


The Little Boy With No Parents

by ferryboats (Alasmylove)



Category: Fallout 3, Fallout 4, Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: F/M, crossover with an obscure work, deacon is the lone wanderer from fo3, elsa and tracy are in the capital wasteland, essentially silliness, idek, kittredge is alive and well in the mojave, levi and lane are having a good time, like really obscure no longer in print can't find it online, one thousand faces meets fallout 4 i guess, probably everyone ooc, the proxies, what is chronological order
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-16
Updated: 2017-08-12
Packaged: 2018-12-03 00:53:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 22,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11521107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alasmylove/pseuds/ferryboats
Summary: Both of Shaun's "parents" survive the incident in the Vault.They were not Shaun's parents. He was in their custody for less than a week. He was part of their cover and nothing more.They bought him off some chem addicts in Boston just before they arrived in Sanctuary Hills.They were international undercover operatives sent to investigate Vault-Tec by a shadow organisation. It went horrifically wrong, in more ways than one. Yes, the residents of the town were frozen for much longer than intended -- but also, a pair of highly trained and genetically modified covert operatives have now been unleashed on the Commonwealth. Father took a calculated risk letting them out, but it turns out he's horrifically bad at math.





	1. I

**I.**

The wound on his head where the bullet had clipped him had closed over while they slept. That was how they knew it had been some days – if not weeks, or months, or years – since the strange suited people broke into the Vault and took the baby. Blood that had frozen before it got a chance to dry oozed sluggishly down his temple to drip from his jaw.

She thought he should clean himself up.

He was in favour of exploring.

They found giant roaches and desiccated skeletons, bones bleached with age and years spent beneath harsh artificial lights.

“Why didn’t you just give them the baby?” she asked him.

He shrugged, kicking at one of the roaches with his toe. “Wasn’t thinking. Tight spaces. Panicked. Sorry.”

She thought on the spider-webbing cracks that had stretched across the reinforced glass of his cryo pod, where he had hammered his fist when he realised what the Vault-Tec technicians were doing to them.

“Fair enough,” she said.

The baby wasn’t even theirs. They’d paid a couple of chem addicts on the streets of Boston in canisters of Jet for it. Him. The baby had been a boy. They had named it, without much originality, Shaun. Neither of them knew what the baby’s birth name had been. They just needed a baby for their cover. Both had done enough child-rearing to last a lifetime. They let the Mister Handy deal with it.

“How long do you suppose it’s been?” she asked, but it was a rhetorical question.

He found an old Pip-Boy on the wrist of a skeleton near the entrance to the vault. It still worked.

“Two hundred and ten years,” he told her, squinting at the small screen illuminating his face. “Unless this is malfunctioning. But they usually don’t. These things last forever.”

She made a noncommittal noise. “I guess we’ll see. Suppose there’s anyone still alive up there?”

“Might be, if whoever came and took the baby came recently. If that was a hundred and eighty years ago, I wouldn’t be so certain,” he replied, plugging the Pip-Boy into the door controls.

“Who are we going to be?” she asked him, as they stood and watched the door roll aside to reveal the elevator, which looked to be in working order.

“Nate and Nora,” he replied.

“Boring.”

He shrugged again. “Don’t want to draw too much attention.”

“We look like blueberries,” she said, gesturing to their bright Vault Suits as they stepped onto the elevator. They had considered the tatty lab coats of the dead scientists, but ultimately turned up their noses at pulling on clothes men and women had decomposed in. His Vault Suit was stained on the right shoulder, where blood had thawed and seeped in.

“Eh. Maybe we’ll find something on the surface.” He did not seem concerned.

She wasn’t either, really. “So, you’re ‘Nate’ and I’m ‘Nora.’” They were stealing the names of their next door neighbours, but the original Nate and Nora were too dead to care about identity theft. “And we’re from Vault 111. Where…”

“We were cryogenically frozen, obviously,” he said. The metal roof above their heads peeled back and the elevator reached the top. “Vault-Tec was up to all sorts of fucked up stuff. How much do you reckon the people in this world have realised? Probably quite a bit. We can’t be the only ones who got messed around.”

“True,” she agreed, moving to the edge of the look-out to peer down at Sanctuary. “Two hundred and ten years seems about right,” she added, examining pieces of roofing material torn away by the wear, cars rusting into the ground, and plants growing wild.

“Told you,” he said smugly.

They set up a base of operations in their old house, which was as good as any as far as either of them could tell, neither of them having any real knowledge of structural engineering. She talked to their miraculously still functioning robot butler while he went in search of tools to patch holes in the walls and roof, and returned with all sorts of odds and ends, including pre-War food.

“Do you think it’s edible?” she asked him that night, as they sat by a drum of burning brush he’d dragged into their yard.

He was scraping around the inside of a can of pork and beans with a rusty spoon, and he shrugged. “Won’t kill me,” he said.

Wouldn’t kill her, either, so she ate and ignored the old, bitter flavour.

They slept on a magnificent bed made of all couch cushions of all their neighbours piled into a heap in their living room, with the original Nate and Nora’s bedroom rug as a decent, if somewhat dusty, blanket. There were no bedbugs. He thought they must have starved to death. There was some evidence that Sanctuary Hills had been sporadically occupied over the years, but not enough to sustain parasites in the bedding.

On the third morning, they got bored of the names Nate and Nora to which there had been no real attachment anyway and started calling themselves Leeu and Yatagarasu, which was a lot better.

On their fourth morning, as they were digging a row and planting the seeds from a melon plant they’d found growing wild behind the house across the road, they heard distant gunfire.

On the fifth morning, the gunfire was close, as near as Concord.

He went and dug up the cache where he’d stored his guns, and they spent the morning disassembling, cleaning, putting them back together and counting rounds of ammunition. After a hasty lunch of some wild fruit growing on small trees along the far edge of the house up the hill from them, they set off to Concord – and almost shot a stunning German Shepherd dog for startling them as they went past the Red Rocket truck stop.

“Reminds me of that dog Kitt and Silva brought home,” he said, scratching it under the chin.

“That thing?” she asked. “Woulda taken your arm off for looking at it sideways. I like this dog. He’s friendly. We should call him Bo. That’s a cute name for a dog.”

“Do we want a cute name, or a scary name?” he replied, stepping back to assess the German Shepherd. “Someone needs to trim his claws. They’ll give up away, clicking like they are. He’s cute. Bo will do.”

In Concord, they found a group of men and women dressed in armour cobbled together from leather and metal bits and pieces attacking some other people in the old Civil War Museum, which had an ancient crashed Vertibird halfway through its roof and was somehow still standing.

The dog was not cute, proving this by leaping on one of the raiders and tearing out his throat.

Leeu and Yatagarasu rather liked the patched-together armour of the raiders. They had much fewer compunctions about taking things off still warm bodies – they’d looted corpses plenty before the bombs dropped, why change their ways now? – but they were confused by the collections of rusty old bottlecaps on strings, or in loose handfuls, that they found going over the bodies for ammunition.

There was still fighting occurring inside the Museum, and people calling for help from the top floor, so they went in.

What followed was a comedy of errors in which everyone survived so it was all right, but Leeu and Yatagarasu both agreed to be wary of the potential for other giant wildlife, following their experiences with roaches and mosquitos and now… lizard things that were basically just vicious wingless dragons, there was no two ways to describe them.

Preston Garvey and his ragtag little group of friends moved in to Sanctuary Hills and took up the house across the way from Leeu and Yatagarasu. They found him amusing, and he seemed to be trying to do the right thing, even if he was just one man all by himself. They were very wary of the little old woman in the group, even though her eyes were mostly clouded with cataracts.

She kept dropping hints about them having a child, and having had a long past in Sanctuary, neither of which were strictly true, but both of which might be considered true if someone had a copy of the wrong piece of misinformation, and was trying to misinform them back. They decided she was a plant, but a relatively benign one that was likely to die off from its own accord sooner rather than later, and did not take her around the back of the house to put a bullet between her eyes.

The new settlers were _very_ demanding.

Leeu was roped into making Sanctuary Hills more liveable for other people, sent off to find seeds for crops and more food and bits of pieces needed for water pumps and automated turrets and salvageable mattresses. He grumbled and complained and began to cast out from Sanctuary in loose semi-circles south – they’d quickly realised there was nothing useful to the north of them except the old Vault, which could prove a useful shelter in the future so they left it.

Yatagarasu and the dog were sent off to help settlers deal with more raiders at Tenpines Bluff. Then she was sent to help some other settlers at Oberland Station with some more raiders. Then she was sent to ally with the farm to their west, who needed help with – raiders!

Just for a change of pace.

The old plant told them the dog was called Dogmeat.

Leeu and Yatagarasu, who were beginning to be tired of being called Leeu and Yatagarasu now they had discovered they could tell anyone any name and it didn’t matter, there were no public records of that sort of thing anymore, and had resolved to introduce themselves as completely different people to the next unallied group they found, thought the name Dogmeat was tasteless. It implied that in a time of hardship, they might turn around and eat the dog, as if it were not a friend and stalwart companion but a form of backup nutrition.

Which might very well be the case in this post-nuclear apocalypse world, neither of them knew what the winter might look like.

Still, they continued to call the dog Bo.


	2. II.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Danse is one of the few people who will ever be told the straight truth about Levi and Lane, but he may never believe it.
> 
> Still, he can recognise someone with a useful skillset when he sees them, even if they are utterly useless at following orders.

**II.**

Dusk was falling. The autumn air was chill.

Rhys was down behind him, and when Danse inevitably fell, Haylen would not be able to protect herself and the downed Knight. This was it. This was the end. Their distress message had failed to reach anyone. They were as dead as Knight Keane bleeding out onto the asphalt not twenty yards away.

Danse stood with a straight back and a grim expression and stared death in the face.

The feral ghouls came on.

Distantly, a dog barked.

He ignored the sound. There were many disgusting mongrels that roamed these streets.

The ghouls screamed and clawed at his armour. He fired round after round into their rotting bodies. Arms came off, legs, and still they came, ignorant of their own injuries.

And then – a flicker of movement to his right, something blue, a _Vault Suit_? and he had just enough sense to bellow: “Civilian on the perimeter! Watch your fire!”

Not a civilian. _Civilians_. Two of them, with a great black and tan war dog, leaping enthusiastically into battle with the oncoming ghouls. The woman was wielding a pipe wrench with a mean spike welded onto it, driving it with tremendous force into ghouls’ heads and wrenching it free with such a mess that her targets stayed down, and the man had one of those old crank rifles with which he was surprisingly efficient.

They were barking at each other in another language. Not English. Something sharp and quick and occasionally guttural.

For a moment, Danse found himself out of combat, the tide of ghouls pushed back, the civilians working as a team to methodically eliminate them, with the dog finishing off the stragglers. And then there were no more ghouls, just stinking bodies, and the civilians were picking through the corpses, pocketing this watch and that pin and those bottlecaps and tossing away rattles and spoons and useless bits of jewellery.

They looked at Knight Keane, and then at Danse and beyond Danse at Haylen and Rhys, shared a glance between them, and purposely left his body desecrated.

Danse cleared his throat awkwardly. “Thank you for your assistance, civilian—”

“We’re not civvies,” the man said, with an accent. “Ain’t been a ‘civilian’ in years.” And then he laughed, and she laughed too, as if he’d made some sort of uproarious joke.

They were wearing Vault Suits. Identical 111s blazoned across their backs. But they didn’t fight like any Vault Security Danse had ever seen. Vault-Dwellers, even the security personnel, were usually so anxious about encountering contagions or radiation that they didn’t venture far from their Vaults – _let alone join a melee involving feral ghouls_.

“Who are you?” Danse asked, suspiciously.

The man, tallish, broad-shouldered, muscularly built, with dark hair streaked with grey, dark eyes, tanned skin, and the scruffy beginnings of a beard introduced himself as Blackburn. Danse still couldn’t place the accent. It was strange and grating.

The woman was short and lean and athletic. Blood had spattered her face, and then been wiped away with an equally dirty sleeve leaving her smeared red-brown with gore. She, too, had dark hair and dark eyes, but she had angular features where the man looked plain. She introduced herself as Moon.

Danse asked them where they were from, ignoring the sidelong glance the pair of them gave each other.

“Kobe, Japan,” she said.

“Pretoria,” the man said. “South Africa.”

“Where’d you get the Pip-Boy and the Vault Suits?” Danse asked, still suspicious, while a part of his mind that had looked over pre-War maps back at base wondered at the distances they were claiming to have travelled. Travel between the continents hadn’t been possible in years and years – there were no seaworthy vessels left to make the distance, and not even the Prydwen in all her glory could cross the vastness of the ocean.

The only possible way was to hope for a mild winter, travel as far north and west as possible, and then take a boat the eleven miles between the tip of Alaska and the edge of the Siberian vastness.

The sheer distance was mind boggling. Just crossing what was once upon a time the continental United States was a phenomenal feat.

“How?” Danse asked.

“Oh, pre-War,” the man, Blackburn said. “Years and years pre-War. See, we had a bit of a cryogenics accident at our Vault the day the bombs fell and ended up missing about two hundred years of action. Just got out three weeks ago, thought we’d see the sights.”

“You were in Vault 111,” Danse clarified.

“Yeah, up near Sanctuary Hills,” the woman said, turning to point north and west.

Danse would not know it, but this would be one of the rare occasions where the strange man and woman in the Vault 111 told anyone the truth about where they had come from. In fact, Danse would not know it but by asking for their help retrieving something to fix Recon Team Gladius’ long range broadcast, he would save his own life over and over again.

Instead, Danse took stock of Moon and Blackburn as they poked around Cambridge Police Station, collecting bits and pieces the team had not considered valuable. Moon raided the bathrooms and the cells, returning with strips of old fabric and soap and even scavenged a Stimpak, some Rad-X, and some antibiotics from somewhere Recon Team Gladius had overlooked. Blackburn collected up an old typewriter, a pair of desk fans, and some of the circuitry from the Nuka Cola machine in the next room, and sat down by the light of the lantern to pull his haul apart.

Danse saw Haylen watching attentively as Blackburn expertly retriever nuts and bolts and screws and gears, circuit boards and lengths of copper wire, all of which he packed carefully away into little pockets sewn onto the dog’s vest.

Food and cans of purified water was pulled out of the one large pocket on the dog’s vest and handed around, and the two strange newcomers listened to Haylen until long past nightfall as she explained in detail the item they were going to try and retrieve from ArcJet Systems in the morning. She stopped when Blackburn took a stick of charcoal from one of the dog’s many pockets and sketched what she wanted exactly in rough detail on the wood of the floor.

“Yes! You know the component?” Haylen exclaimed joyfully.

“’Course,” Blackburn replied. “If I had an old radio, a telephone, a bit more copper wire, some soldering iron, and some smaller pliers we wouldn’t have to go to ArcJet at all. We were trained how to rig these sorts of things in the field. It wouldn’t be as durable, of course, but it’d _work_.”

He looked mournfully at the pliers he had, which looked small and fiddly already to Danse, but were apparently not fit for the job. And Danse wondered what sort of job required that sort of training. Only a select few military specialists, surely?

Blackburn and Moon shared another in a long series of cryptic looks that Danse could not decipher, and then they retired to one of the back rooms for the night, the dog padding after them.

When Danse inevitably woke from night terrors of his friends and squad-mates dying a couple of hours before dawn and got up to pace around the base and make certain everything was in order, he found Moon sitting on the floor with her eyes level with a crack between the boards in one of the windows.

Light from distant fire highlighted her cheeks and brow, clean now thank goodness, she’d put that soap to good use already. The occasional distant gunshot flash across her features, but she did not flinch.

“My watch is from midnight to three,” she murmured to Danse softly, offering him a report he didn’t verbally ask for. “All quiet. Some raiders having a shootout with a rogue Mister Gutsy on the other side of the river, but nothing to be concerned about. Blackburn will take over from me. You can go back to bed, sir. Me or Blackburn will wake you if we think there’s a threat.”

Blinking, disconcerted, but strangely reassured, Danse returned to his sleeping roll.

The assault on ArcJet Systems was a resounding success – in as much a mission can be a success when a CO was paired with two subordinates who didn’t seem to possess an ear between them and as a result ignored his instructions completely.

The whole shenanigan started the moment they were out the door, first thing in the morning – Moon nodded to Blackburn, smiled brightly at Danse in a way that made him feel nauseously anxious, whistled for the dog, and then bounded off ahead to scout the route. Danse had just asked the two civilians-who-were-maybe-not-civilians-but-weren’t-Brotherhood-either to follow him.

“Vanguard, rear guard,” Blackburn explained without explaining, because how could a single person and a dog act as a vanguard? He, Danse, was in Power Armour, and had the stopping power to be considered a ‘rear guard.’

They passed fallen traders and raiders, a pair of bloatflies that looked like they had exploded, and a small pack of dead feral dogs that had been shot close-range with a low calibre gun, but Moon had been using that wicked pipe wrench, and she was sitting on the step outside ArcJet Systems waiting for them with that same pipe wrench bloodied on her knee.

“I named it, you know,” she said, showing off all her teeth in a feral grin. “This is _Piping Hot Pain Time_. I’ve got a backup melee weapon in Bo’s pack there. Lead pipe. That one is _Pipe Up I Dare You_.”

Danse could understand naming a weapon. He hefted _Righteous Authority_ and wondered whether puns were a necessary part of it.

“What about that old crank rifle Blackburn’s got?” Danse asked.

“We’ve been calling it the _Minutemen Rifle_ , because it being the one weapon every single Minuteman we’ve come across has been using,” Blackburn said. “All right. We are doing this?”

They stormed ArcJet weirdly. Blackburn entered the building first and disappeared within moments. Moon and the dog, Bo, stuck by his side.

“Why are we waiting here?” Danse asked, because he wanted to push on.

Moon touched the arm of his Power Armour and shook her head. “We’re not alone. Something mechanical is moving deeper in the building. Might be rogue Protectrons. Might be something else. Blackburn will assess the situation and return with intel.”

“How do you know?” Danse asked.

She gestured vaguely at her ear and did not elaborate.

Distantly, there was gunfire, and twenty minutes later Blackburn came back, dragging a sparking and mutilated early model Synth by the foot.

“ _Yussus_. There’s more of these fuckers further in,” he said, and spat on the floor. “Looks like robotics took a whole great big stride further up uncanny valley while we were on ice.”

“No kidding,” Moon said, crouching down to poke at the slack plastic face of the Synth with the claw on the end of _Piping Hot Pain Time_. “What is this _thing_?”

“They don’t all look like that,” Danse explained to them, taking a deep breath and heading deeper into the building. “That’s an early model Synth. The later models – you can’t even tell them from men and women. That sort of abomination is why the Institute must be stopped. That’s one of the reasons why the Brotherhood of Steel exists. To put an end to senseless experimentation like this, senseless experimentation that ended the world.”

And so, as they were mowing down Synths on their way deeper into ArcJet Systems, Danse found himself explaining the ideals of the Brotherhood to the strange man and the woman, who fought Synths as competently and fearlessly as they fought ghouls. He watched Blackburn take an energy bolt to the shoulder, shrug it off, and keep firing as if it had never happened. He watched Moon tear Synths to pieces with the same efficiency as she had flesh the evening before, _Piping Hot Pain Time_ smashing robotic components and tearing away swaths of grey plastic skin.

And he wondered.

When they reached the surface, the deep range transmitter secured, he made a hesitant suggestion that they join up with the Brotherhood.

They shared one of their glances, then both smiled and agreed and Danse was struck with a sudden fear because it was like looking into the grinning maws of a pair of deathclaws.

From then on, until the day the Prydwen came floating into the Commonwealth accompanied by a fleet of Vertibirds, Danse saw one or the other of them every other day. They would stop by the police station, drop pieces of equipment off with Haylen or report an area cleared of targets to Rhys, and then vanish again.

They were regularly accompanied by other people. Sometimes a scruffy little sniper with bad teeth and a worse attitude, or a dark-haired woman in a red coat and cap who asked too many questions, one of a pair of Mister Handy model robots, a red-headed woman with a smattering of freckles and vile mouth. or by a bald man with sunglasses. Others still they came dangerously close to getting shot by turning up with a cheerful little ghoul in a tricorne hat in tow, an early-model Synth dressed up in a tattered trench coat and a fedora, and one time – _once_ – accompanied by a surly Super Mutant.

Danse decided it was prudent not to ask too many questions about the company they kept when they weren’t at Cambridge Police Station. The less he knew, the better.

They were still assets, no matter their questionable companionship choices, especially after they tracked down and sent Paladin Brandis to the Station.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Deacon next time probably.
> 
> The names Blackburn and Moon are technically correct here, although all they gave Danse were surnames. Their full "names" are Levi Blackburn and Lane Moon. This will be the only time their "real" names are given, although because they have been given to Danse they have been, by extension, given to the rest of the Brotherhood.
> 
> Their birth names are Pieter Duvenhage and Akiyama Mei, but that will probably never come up and they've been Levi and Lane much, much longer.


	3. III.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Deacon's perspective.

**III.**

Patriot slipped the Railroad the tip.

Watch the entrance to Vault 111.

No one knew the details, but everyone was sure something big was going to go down. So Deacon made himself scarce and headed north up into the hills above Boston to keep an eye on the Vault.

A few days later, while he was a couple a’ hundred yards off, sitting in the late autumn sunlight and enjoying a Nuka Cola, the Vault opened and a man and a woman stepped out dressed in Vault Suits. Deacon had set his Nuka Cola aside to peer through his binoculars at them, but they didn’t appear particularly special, and they didn’t do anything interesting for the better part of a week.

Just pottered around Sanctuary, fixing up one house in particular and stripping the others for whatever parts they deemed necessary.

And then, abruptly, they were on the move, taking down a deathclaw in the middle of Concord as if they did that sort of thing every other Saturday and bringing the stragglers of the last of the Minutemen back to their little settlement.

Deacon watched the man build automated turrets from nothing but bits and pieces, watched the woman construct a rudimentary generator with parts scavenged from the Red Rocket across the bridge between seemingly random trips that took her far afield, watched them tear down houses in hours just to put up formidable walls. Watched until the only way in and out of town was across the bridge and through the bristling turrets.

He followed them for days as they moved through Boston, packing light, taking only what they needed and loading down the dog with anything they deemed necessary but heavy to leave themselves free to move easily. They were quick and quiet and could move from one side of the city to the other without alerting any raiders, ghouls, Super Mutants, or other unwanted attention.

He watched them save a Brotherhood of Steel reconnaissance team, disgust coiling in his gust and warring with awe at the way they fought.

He watched them leave the Brotherhood outpost again the next afternoon, and felt relief.

By the time they reached Diamond City, they knew he was there. He knew they knew he was there.

They convinced the gate guard to let them in and went off to run some errand, then met Deacon as they came back out and introduced themselves. He was Josiah and she was Evelyn. They were looking for Nick Valentine, hoping to track someone down.

“The third member of our _ménage à trois_ , Maxwell,” she explained.

They changed their clothes and introduced themselves to him again two days later in Goodneighbour, where they hired on MacCready for an unspecified number of caps and a dangerous lack of concern about their new mercenary’s history. This time they were Goodwin and Tatum, a married couple who needed some help clearing the raiders out of their home.

Deacon didn’t believe that for a minute, and wasn’t surprised when they cleared the old Minutemen Castle of Mirelurks two days later.

He was unsurprised when the man described the _Mirelurk Queen_ as nothing more than an overzealous crab.

At around this point a had started being passed around between the man, the woman, and poor overworked Preston Garvey. The hat was spectacularly ordinary, just a ragged tan-coloured thin with a wide brim, the sort of thing any member of the local militia group might be caught sporting. This hat had one difference. Someone had found a needle and some black thread and embroidered, in thick wonky letters MINITEMAN GENRAL onto the front of it.

Somehow, the General-ship of the Minutemen became attached to the hat. Whichever unfortunate person had the hat foisted upon them was the General of the Minutemen until they could catch someone sleeping, or otherwise unawares, and pass it on to them before making a hasty escape.

So, Garvey was the General, and then the woman was the General, and then Garvey was the General again, and the man was the General for two days before they tied the hat on the dog and it stayed there for a week. Deacon stole the hat and spent two days as the General of the Minutemen until a tourist sent by Desdemona told him to stop messing around and get back to work. Reluctantly, he snuck the hat into the woman’s belongings and left.

Deacon fancied the hat game would keep them occupied for at least another few days and headed back north to investigate Vault 111. He found nothing he could use, though the scrubbed terminals and the pods of frosty corpses were as telling as the desiccated skeletons.

Something terrible had happened here, and they had wiped away the evidence, leaving a whole lot of bodies with no names.

When he got back south they were running missions for the Paladin out in Cambridge Police Station.

And the next morning they were braking a guy out of Diamond City jail, and the day after that befriending Hancock personally.

Deacon watched on with increasing amazement as they recruited a Super Mutant called Strong, and finally rescued Nick Valentine, only to immediately go off to Fort Hagen of all places and blow Kellogg off the map.

And then, while taking a roundabout route back to Sanctuary Hills, they stumbled upon Covenant, a place Deacon and Desdemona by extension were deeply suspicious of. This was the last place Amelia Stockton had been seen alive. Deacon watched from outside for a time, just another drifter passing by. The man and the woman went inside Covenant, stayed until just after dusk, came back out again, and approached him immediately.

“You work for the Railroad,” the woman said, before Deacon could say ‘how do you do.’

He was professional enough not to gape at her.

He was the best at his job, but these two were good enough at counter-espionage that he had nothing on them beyond their random and inexplicable series of actions that seemed truly unaffiliated with any extant Commonwealth faction, and it shouldn’t’ve surprised him that she had guessed who his boss was.

“I’m just a tumbleweed, passing on through,” Deacon replied, a bit stupidly, at a loss for words.

“You do not work with the Institute,” the woman went on, as if he’d said nothing. “Their spies watch us already, report back more reliably than any human could.”

_What?_

His face must have betrayed his confusion, because she pointed at the black crows sitting in a tree not far off.

“It’s only some of them,” she said, conspiratorially. “Maybe one in twenty. A wolf among the sheep. Watchers in the flock. If they can make synthetic people, they can make synthetic birds. They can make whole flocks of synthetic birds and let them free, and it doesn’t matter if one or two or three are picked off to be someone’s dinner, as long as the one with the cameras and the feed in its brain is still functioning.”

“It’s that one, third on the right, on the branch with the forks tied to it,” the man added.

“Also,” the woman said. “You’re not a Synth.”

What? How could they tell?

“The component makes a noise,” she said. “Like a little mosquito buzzing in your ear, high and whining. We can hear it, can’t we dear?”

“We can,” the man agreed. Then he said: “Hello, my name is Durchenko, and this is Riko. We’re members of the Three-Legged Crows. There’s a girl being held against her will in some sort of compound just across this lake. We were planning a rescue mission. Want to help?”

Deacon peered at them suspiciously. “What if she’s a Synth?” he asked.

The man and the woman looked at each other, eyes glinting in the light of the setting sun reflecting off the clouds.

“We’re pretty friendly,” the man said, eventually. Deacon thought about the corpses in the Vault, the trail of bodies they’d left, Kellogg’s brains spattered all over the floor. “So long as you’re not trying to kill us.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was going to be longer, cover them joining the Railroad and some other stuff, but I like the ending where it is.
> 
> I think I'll pick up with either Levi and Lane as the POV characters, or Nick Valentine next.


	4. IV.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We learn more about our rogue Survivors because Nick Valentine is a damn good detective who can work with what he's told, what he isn't told, and any tiny slips someone makes.
> 
> And, let's be honest, Levi and Lane are 200 years into the future. They don't have to be careful if they don't want to be careful because the only people alive who would remember them are an old Synth and people who are hundreds of miles away.

**IV.**

Valentine wasn’t entirely certain who Yatagarasu and Leeu were searching for. Their story had gaping inconsistencies in it, holes that made the detective in him deeply suspicious. The first time he spoke to them, they were looking for their son, a boy called Shaun, an infant stolen away while they were in cryofreeze.

That was a damn lie. Valentine knew it. They knew it.

The second time they spoke of the matter, they said they were looking for their adopted son.

The third time, they just said they were looking for a little boy. Not theirs. Just a little boy.

Valentine got the distinct impression that they were following a trail of breadcrumbs across the Commonwealth, laid for them by someone else. By the Institute. They all seemed to know it was a trap, and yet none of them said a thing, even as they stoically reviewed Kellogg’s memories in the Memory Den, even as they trekked across the Commonwealth to the edge of the glowing sea – even as they worked their way across the radioactive hotspot where the big nuke hit all those years ago.

Yatagarasu and Leeu were not human.

They ate and drank and slept. They breathed, their hearts beat, and they pissed and crapped.

They walked across the expanse of the Glowing Sea after taking a couple of Rad-X pills between them, wearing nothing more protective than Vault Suits insulated with lead. They did not vomit, or faint, and their skin did not slough off or start to rapidly decay or begin to glow.

They showed no more reaction to the radiation than Valentine did.

Valentine said nothing, but catalogued this fact for later perusal.

If he was honest with himself, and he usually was, he didn’t even think the later generation Synths were this immune to radiation. Being so close to human came with inherent downfalls, even if they weren’t as severe. There was a reason no one had come for Doctor Virgil, after all, why no Coursers had been sent across this stretch of land, why the Glowing Sea was safe.

Doctor Virgil was a Super Mutant.

Yatagarasu and Leeu took this fact in stride, accepted their task, and set back off across the Glowing Sea to kill an Institute Coursers as if they had not been handed a suicide mission. Finally, as they were nearing the end of their long trek in the radiation, night long since fallen, Valentine saw them react. It started with a shiver, Yatagarasu hunching her shoulders around her ears, dark hair plastered to her head by sweat.

They stopped and doled out more Rad-X, but Yatagarasu’s teeth chattered.

Beyond the edge of the Glowing Sea, in the darkness of the night, beneath a tree that had shed its leaved for the long, cold winter, they scraped a small hole in the earth and lined it with stones then started a fire. Their faces were taut with discomfort in the firelight. Valentine lit up a cigarette and watched Leeu dig a couple of packets of RadAway from his rucksack. Perhaps they were human after all, he mused, as Leeu and Yatagarasu hung the RadAway on the lower branches of the trees, slipped the needles attached to the IV lines into their veins, and sat down to let gravity do the work.

“You can sleep, you know,” Valentine told them. “I can keep watch.”

A grim nod of the head, an exhausted smile, a mutter of what might have been thanks but might have just been a noise of acceptance at the back of someone’s throat. They slept like the dead and woke with the dawn with bleeding gums and dark smudges beneath their eyes but in good spirits.

They talked about the past as they headed for the ruins of CIT to hopefully pick up the signal of a Courser. The fact that Valentine had the memories of a detective from before the War fascinated them.

“I mean,” Yatagarasu said. “Siekert hypothesised it was possible. And Kittredge had the hardware in his head, ready to go. But we never got around to testing it.”

Those names rang a distant bell.

“Maxwell Kittredge?” Valentine asked. There were probably a thousand people with that name before the bombs fell, but he’d been thoroughly briefed by the Chief of Police about the Program and the work they might be doing around Boston. And there was a list of the names of people he was supposed to un-arrest as quickly and quietly as possible on the off chance they got picked up.

Elsa Siekert and Maxwell Kittredge were two of a dozen, and it was strange to hear both surnames said in the same sentence two hundred years on.

Leeu and Yatagarasu regarded him, but not with surprise.

“There must have been protocol with local law enforcement,” Leeu said, answering Valentine’s question without answering it.

“So, you two were Program, eh?” Valentine mused, and it _made so much sense_.

The fact they were in Boston two hundred years on was a bit of a conundrum, but Program operatives would’ve been able to survive that length of time even in the shoddiest cryostasis. There had been rumours for years that the Program operatives had been extensively experimented on – the only living subjects to have been exposed to the Proxy drugs and survived to tell the tale, the only people to have ever been deliberately given all strains of the DYCOSAL retroviral therapy.

They could survive things no human could.

Some people said that the disastrous FEV was an attempt at recreating strains five-through-eleven of DYCOSAL. Five-through-eleven were never introduced into the general population, but they were the strains that created the most resilience in the host. It failed spectacularly. Valentine couldn’t say he was surprised. The secrets of DYCOSAL had been lost for sixty years by then, and the research behind the Proxy drugs had been wiped a lot longer ago.

Only the sequence of A-Proxy remained, but A-Proxy was as lethal as it had ever been. No one could ever recreate B-Proxy, though they tried and accidentally created the first ghouls.

If Leeu and Yatagarasu were Program, it was no wonder they could cross the Glowing Sea, there and back, and make it out with only a little discomfort.

“Why are you looking for that kid?” Valentine asked, eventually.

“Because someone wants us to,” Yatagarasu replied.

“They put down a real neat set of clues leading right to the Institute’s front doorstep,” Leeu added. “Someone wants us to go there really bad, and we reckon it’s the Institute inviting us on in, in a funny way. No one else out here has those kinds of resources.”

“So,” Yatagarasu said. “We figure: might as well see what they’re so desperate for us to find out, eh?”

In the end, Valentine wasn’t even surprised when they tore the Courser to shreds within moments.

Program operatives in Boston two hundred years later.

Goddamn.

The future suddenly looked mighty interesting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter: The Institute and Father.


	5. V.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Father doesn't know what to do.

**V.**

Teleportation was an uncomfortable sensation. She didn’t like it. From the pinched expression on his face, he found it no more pleasant. She fancied teleportation was even more uncomfortable when you knew how it worked. That you were being disassembled somewhere, replicated, and recreated at a sub-atomic level somewhere else.

Very advanced technology.

So many ways for it to go wrong and the person being teleported to find their spleen lodged in their lung or their ribcage turned inside out or their whole body just a pile of ooze on the floor.

Uncomfortable.

She would not be doing it again in a hurry, not if she had her way.

The place they found themselves was… sterile. Spotless. Stale. The air tasted recycled, metallic, like a thousand people had breathed it before her. The hallways stank of antiseptic. They tried several doors that they passed, but the doors were all biometrically locked. They could have hacked them, of course, but it would have been messy and taken time and both of them were aware of the little gleaming cameras set at strategic points along the ceiling, watching them like eyes.

Walking towards the elevator, guided by the disembodied voice of an elderly man, was strangely like being in a futuristic hospital. Or perhaps a very strange prison.

Lane had become used to the filthy chaos of the world above. Or had she always been used to chaos? Had churned up battlefields and rotting graffitied tenements and garbage-strewn streets lined with the homeless and ramshackle shelters and dense forest always been her home, and the square tidiness of civilisation always been foreign?

She mused on that as she and Levi rode the glass elevator downwards, through the high atrium with its trees green even though it was the middle of winter, down into the belly of the Institute.

They were let out into another corridor. This one was short and led to a square room with a glass box in the corner. In the box was a Synth child, the one from Kellogg’s memories.

“Are they clones?” Levi wondered. “Are they born as babies and grown up? Or are they created as adult men and women?”

“Either, way, are they any less human?” Lane mused, thinking of dear old Paladin Danse, such a beautiful and flawed human being, so dedicated to a twisted-up cause, who also happened to have something in his head that made an irritating whine that was hard to ignore.

Thinking of cheerful Sturges, who was open and honest and genuine and just wanted to help however he could.

Thinking of the raider, the first Synth they had met and killed, whose brains they had picked through curiously to find the mechanical component in their head, who had looked and smelled and behaved like all the other raiders in their troop.

Thinking of Amelia Stockton, trapped and terrified in the compound on the other side of the lake.

Thinking of the frightened men and women with just letters and numbers instead of names they had helped the Railroad relocate.

“No,” Levi said.

The little boy stared up at them with wide frightened eyes. He didn’t look much like them, beyond the dark eyes. He was a couple of shades too dark, his cheeks smattered with freckles, his ears stuck out funny and he had a button nose that neither Lane nor Levi possessed. Was this what Shaun would have grown into? Lane wondered.

They must have scared him, two dirty, bruised, bloodied adults, one with a gun holstered across his shoulders, the other with a wicked pipe wrench tucked into her belt. The little boy called for help, called for someone named Father. Cried.

A previously locked door slid open and a little old man with white hair and a white beard said some sort of code to the boy, who suddenly slumped still.

Synths had deactivation codes, Lane noted, and filed that fact away for later.

The little old man was human, and sick. She could smell the disease on his breath, the chemicals in his body, from halfway across the room.

He introduced himself as Father, the Director of the Institute. And then he introduced himself again, as Shaun, their son, looking at them with a strangely vulnerable expression, even as he said to Levi: “Kellogg’s report said you did not survive my extraction from the Vault, and yet here you are. Here you both are. Mother. Father.”

Lane looked at Levi, who gazed back at her with a sort of constipated wince that meant he was trying very hard not to start swearing or laughing, and it was hard to tell which it was this time.

She turned to Father, small and hunched and sick and the Director of the Institute.

“Did you want us here because of your poor health?” she asked.

Father gaped.

“It would have been a lot easier,” she continued. “To have just had someone come to Vault 111 and pick us up. Why send us on a scavenger hunt throughout the city?”

Father took a deep breath, swallowed. “I can understand your anger—” he began.

Lane interrupted him. “I’m not angry. Can’t speak for my partner right this moment, but I’m just curious. It must have required an awful lot of organisation and effort for something that could have been much, much easier.”

Levi cleared his throat. “Curious,” he echoed, and Lane realised he had been trying not to laugh.

“You had to be tested,” Father said. “We needed to know how competent you were. If you were foolish enough to drink the water and die of radiation poisoning or dysentery as soon as you left the Vault, you would be of little use to us. To the Institute.”

Lane scratched her ear. “You want us to do something?”

“Yes. I will explain later. For now, come with me. See the Institute. Tell me what you think.”

They took a tour, examined the Synth gorillas critically, examined the laboratory where Synths were created even more critically, spoke to various doctors, examined the quality of medicine available, and came back to Father seething.

“If you shared some of this with the people on the surface, you could improve peoples’ lives tenfold,” Lane said, crossly. “Why don’t you?”

Father’s excuse was weak.

Lane told him an anecdote about a man who wanted to craft humanity as he saw fit, and eliminate those who didn’t match up with his ideal view. He tested the effectiveness of his plan by immunising his chosen few with DYCOSAL and left the others to die of radiation sickness after barricading off a city in the Pacific North West.

His name was Lester Pullins.

It happened a long, long time ago, sixty-three years before the bombs fell.

“Do you know what we did to him?” Lane asked.

Father shook his head.

“We threw him from the pent-house suite of a twenty-five-floor building.”

“You’re not my parents, are you?” Father asked, after a lengthy silence.

Levi and Lane shook their heads.

Lane told Father: “We needed to be a family unit as part of our cover for infiltrating Vault 111. I’d already had and raised two grown children.”

“I had four,” Levi said. “Put one in the ground myself.”

“We took steps years before the Vault to prevent further pregnancies. Both of us,” Lane said.

“So, when we got to Boston we scouted the local homeless communities, found a couple with a likely candidate, and did a trade. Jet, for you. We had you nine days. The Mister Handy did most of the work. You should have rescued him from Sanctuary, because he took more care of you than we ever did.”

Father mulled this over for a long, long time. “Who are you?” he asked, at length.

“The Three-Legged Crows,” Lane replied.

“They sound like mutants,” Father said.

“They’re an old mythological creature in East Asian cultures,” Lane explained. “Sun crows. In one story, there were ten of them, one for every sun, and they perched in a mulberry tree. Each day, one crow would fly around the world to give it light and then return to the tree, and when it returned the next crow on the roster would begin its journey. It’s a myth that’s been around for thousands of years. They symbolise rebirth, renewal. It is good to be one of the Crows.”

“A nice story,” Father said, looking at them at them with a strange sort of wonder. “You are very old. You were a hundred years old when you went in to Vault 111.”

“Close enough,” Levi said.

“Now you are three hundred years old. I am sixty, and I am dying. I have no successor.”

Ah. That explained the odd quest across the Commonwealth. Father needed someone to replace him.

“What would you have us do?” Lane asked. “We don’t agree with what you’re doing. Not with any of it.”

“I can see that. I can see you were set on your path long before I had you released from your Vault,” Father admitted. “Long before I was born and long before the bombs fell.”

“That wasn’t our fault, by the way,” Levi interjected suddenly. “The Markhor Snake Killers and the Polecats were assigned to the War. We, the Three-Legged Crows, we were strictly investigating Vault-Tec. The apocalypse had _nothing_ to do with us. Just to be clear.”

“You made a young Synth-you. You could always make an adult Synth-you and give it your memories. We saw what you did with Nick Valentine,” Lane suggested. “It’s theoretically possible. Should even be easy.”

Father blanched. “The Board would never agree.”

“Why?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter: Arthur Maxon and Blind Betrayal. Unless I change my mind and write something else. We'll see.


	6. VI.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wow. Blind Betrayal is going to cover TWO whole chapters.

**VI.**

Curiously, no one stopped them looting the place. They grabbed the bedsheets from the room they were assigned, made a makeshift sack, and took every piece of technology and medicine that wasn’t bolted down. On their way out they retrieved the FEV cure for Virgil, convinced one of the doctors to defect and return to the Brotherhood of Steel, and picked up Sturges’ Holotape which Lane tucked securely into one of the pockets on her belt. And then they teleported away, satisfied with the havoc they had wrought – they had left Father arguing so vehemently with the Board that he was literally spitting blood.

They took their loot to the Castle, made two additional copies of the Holotape, gave one back to Sturges, gave one to the Brotherhood of Steel, and gave the last to the Railroad. It seemed fair, they thought, that everyone had access to the same information.

The Brotherhood of Steel was reassembling a giant robot called _Liberty Prime_.

Levi thought it was cool. Lane did too.

They both agreed that a giant mobile robot carrying a nuclear payload was an _absolutely terrible_ idea and spent a couple of nights secretly sabotaging the legs and the weapons systems and whatever else they could hack or otherwise ruin. It was very thorough sabotage that would take weeks to repair, if not months. Hydraulics were cut, super-powerful magnets were disengaged, removed, and dropped far out at sea, joints were clogged with random metallic debris, circuitry was smashed to pieces, power sources were overloaded and left smoking and sparking and spewing radiation.

Levi and Lane were sent with Paladin Danse into the Glowing Sea to secure bombs for the robot. Proctor Ingram seemed ridiculously hopeful that they would get the robot working in short order. Levi and Lane thought she hadn’t discovered the full extent of the sabotage yet, and felt a little bit bad because she was so enthusiastic about her work.

They left Danse guarding the nuclear warheads and went off to find Nick Valentine to investigate a case of a missing girl.

By the time they returned to the Mainland, spring had arrived in the Commonwealth. New leaves grey on trees, green and new, the grass was long and wild, and flowers were unfurling everywhere. Their crops at Sanctuary had come in nicely, tatos and melons and flourishing mutfruit trees and gourds and a whole field of new green razorgrain swaying in the wind. The Castle was doing well, too. The armoury had been dug out, schematics for the old artillery rediscovered, and cannons had been strategically placed on the battlements.

That was where Arthur Maxson and a small group of Knights found them one beautiful spring morning, the sun shining on their backs as they weeded the patch of vegetables where they were growing carrots, Hancock, Strong, and Bo the dog helping out where they could.

Strong was in possession of the MINITEMAN GENRAL hat. It didn’t fit him very well, and he kept trying to pass it to Hancock, who was very good at dodging, and had spent most of the morning being pursued around the courtyard, laughing and yelping as Strong lumbered after him with the offending hat.

“Blackburn, Moon!” Maxson barked. “Where in the blazes have you been the last two months? We’ve needed you?”

“Who?” Hancock called across the courtyard.

Maxson stared at the ghoul, looked half-tempted to pull his rifle and pump him full of lead, but clearly thought better – there were a lot of armed Minutemen patrolling the walls, and if they were unbothered by the ghoul and the Super Mutant, then he would have to be as well. He was not here to start a war.

“Them,” he said, pointing as Levi and Lane.

Levi continued weeding industriously. Lane sat back on her heels, wiped her hair out of her face, and smiled brightly.

“My name is Yatagarasu and this is Leeu,” she replied cheerfully. “We’re Minutemen. You have no authority over us.”

Maxson flushed an ugly red colour. “You are Knight Blackburn and Knight Moon and—”

And Strong dropped the MINITEMAN GENRAL hat on his head, startling him.

Levi and Lane both stood up immediately and saluted him. “General,” they said, solemnly. “Was there something you needed?”

“For goodness sake—” Maxson sputtered, pulling the hat off to stare at it incredulously. “What? Yes there is something I need! Get your asses up to the Prydwen and speak to Proctor Quinlan, now! It’s a matter of utmost importance that we cannot speak of _here_.”

“Yes, General,” Levi and Lane chorused, and immediately headed for the Vertibird parked not far from.

Perplexed and angry, Maxon stared at the hat. To be fair, it was a ratty, smelly, stained old hat with not one but two spelling errors in the embroidery. And a Super Mutant had clapped it on his head!

“The hat has power, man,” Hancock told him. “Whoever bears it is the General of the Minutemen.”

Maxson threw the hat on the ground and stalked off with his group of Knights towards the Vertibird.

Preston Garvey came over, sighed, picked the hat up and put it on.

In the Vertibird, where the other Knights were pretending very hard they weren’t present, Maxson chewed Levi and Lane out about the traitor who’d been in their midst the whole time. The damnable Synth. Paladin Danse, who had gone AWOL after their last mission, whose photograph and DNA profile had been among the files on the Holotape Levi and Lane brought back, a rogue Synth gone missing from the Institute.

“You mean you didn’t know?” Lane asked blankly.

“Wait, does that mean _he_ didn’t know?” Levi said.

“Of course, it knew,” Maxson snapped. “ _It_ was an Institute spy.”

Levi and Lane stared at him.

“Uh,” Lane said. “Well. If he was one of the Synths that the Institute had listed as missing, then chances are he had his memories modified. Most Synths choose that, you know, when they run away from the Institute. It’s safer for everyone if no one knows. So, uh, Danse probably had no idea.”

“How did you know, then?” Maxson asked.

“The mechanical thing in their heads makes a noise,” Levi replied. “We can hear it.”

Maxson was going all red again. “And you didn’t think to mention this to anyone at any point?”

Levi and Lane shrugged in unison.

“He seemed like a soldier genuinely dedicated to the cause,” Lane said. “Why would it matter?”

Maxson sputtered. “Because _it_ isn’t human!” he barked.

“Of course, Danse is human,” Lane told him. “He’s as human as you or me. Actually, scratch that, he’s probably more human than me or Levi. We’ve had done some _interesting_ drugs in our time.”

“It was born of a machine,” Maxson insisted. “Not from a mother. Not naturally. _It isn’t human_.”

“ _Ag_. You’re really racist,” Levi said. “So, what do you want us to do?”

“Kill it. It needs to be made an example of. There will be no traitors in the Brotherhood of Steel.”

“Fuck off, mate,” Levi said, and Lane nodded vehemently. “Paladin Danse is our friend. We don’t go ‘round killing our friends. _Yussus_ , what sort of monsters do you think we are?”

“Knights of the Brotherhood of Steel,” Maxson said, tersely.

“Think we might be considering hanging up our Holotags and quitting, whelp,” Levi said. “If this is how you treat your own.”

The Vertibird docked with the Prydwen.

“You cannot leave,” Maxson insisted. “You’re my best field soldiers. We need you in the fight against the Institute.”

Lane sat back in her seat, not disembarking, and fixed the Elder with a cool stare. “Then don’t ask the impossible.”

“If I was the General of the Minutemen, would you do it?” Maxson asked.

Levi and Lane shook their heads together. “Minutemen wouldn’t consider it a traitorous offense to be a Synth without knowing it in the first place. Hell, Nick Valentine’s an honorary member and no one cares. So’s Mayor Hancock. Danse is a good solider and a good friend. I see where he gets his funny ideas from, though.”

Maxson swore softly to him. “Fine. Whatever. Don’t kill him. Just find him and make sure he doesn’t come back. He is not welcome aboard the Prydwen, is that clear?”

“Harsh,” Lane said. “The Brotherhood is his family. They’re all he’s got.”

Maxson looked like he dearly wanted to tug at his own beard. “He doesn’t come back,” he insisted.

“Whatever,” Lane said. She turned to Levi. “Go speak to Deacon for me. Meet up at the Castle tomorrow morning. I’m going to talk to Proctor Quinlan and see if I can find out where Danse disappeared to.” She fixed her stare on Maxson. “Don’t worry, sir. I’ll make certain he’s okay and finds somewhere to fit in.”

Maxson growled, leapt off the Vertibird, and stalked off. Lane followed him more sedately, waving at Levi as he directed the pilot to drop him off near Diamond City.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ha ha, they're extremely competent, deliberately obtuse, and utterly set in their ways. Others must compromise because they are unbending, unflinching, and so certain of their convictions that they will throw away what looks to others like the opportunity of a lifetime just because they find it disagrees with them. Maxson cannot afford to lose either because they are titans, immense and powerful and more effectively convincing than even a robot armed with nukes.
> 
> Even when they meet him face to face and pretend they have absolutely no idea who he is.
> 
> The Unstoppable Force meets the Immovable Object, and it turns out one of them is not what it seems.
> 
> Next up: Probably Nuka World, OR Levi and Lane stopping the Battle of Bunker Hill before it can start and getting cross at absolutely everyone who tried to participate. We'll see.


	7. VII.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More Blind Betrayal

**VII.**

Danse’s hands shook. His head was muzzy from the alcohol, the hard stuff, he didn’t even remember what it was except that it burned going down, but the gun in his hands was cold and heavy and reassuring. He’d barely eaten in days. Nausea and hunger pangs traded places with each other, and sometimes he found himself dry heaving in the corner, bringing up nothing but stinging bile.

His head ached.

He could barely breathe. It felt like something heavy was sitting in his chest, pressing down on his heart, his belly, his lungs. It hurt in a way his head didn’t.

There was gunfire overhead. A muted explosion, followed by another, as the turrets he’d set up were destroyed. His executioner was come, and he was sure he would suffocate before they even made it out of the elevator, just now powering up. In a way, there was a sense of relief, even as the fear of his death came over him. He’d run so long ago. So many days that had blurred into each other down here in the dark.

But now they were here for him, to put him down for being an abomination, and though he didn’t want to die at least the wait was over. At least he didn’t have to sit down here any longer with the knowledge of the thing that he was.

Moon stepped out of the elevator, raised the heavily modded 10mm pistol he’d long ago learned was called _Pop-Pop_ , and destroyed the Protectron in the other room. It was good that his executioner would be Moon. Her quiet and steady confidence had soothed his ragged nerves on missions before, even though he was aware that Blackburn was the more tactically proficient of the two of them.

He sighed and looked down at the gun held loosely in his fingers.

She stepped into the room, and Danse waited for the crack of _Pop-Pop_ being fired in close quarters. Waited for the icy pick of _Piping Hot Pain Time_ to stab into his temple and pull his head to pieces. Instead he heard soft footsteps, leather shoes like whispers on the concrete, the creak of her knees as she knelt before him, and, so softly he wasn’t sure he heard at all: “Oh, Danse.”

“Get on with it,” he told her, despondently, throat tightening with the fear that maybe she would draw this out.

He’d never known her to be cruel. She despatched her enemies briskly and took no joy in it, but perhaps when it came to betrayals of a more personal nature, her kills were more personal, too.

Gentle fingers pried his hands away from the gun.

It made a noise that grated on Danse’s ears as she sent it skittering away across the floor into the far corner.

“I’m here to take you home,” she said.

At last Danse looked at her face, and he saw pity there and it made him want to heave.

“Not to the Prydwen,” she amended. “Somewhere safe.”

“You should kill me,” he said. “I’m a monster. I’m a Synth.”

“You really didn’t know, then.”

“Of course, I didn’t know!” he snapped. “How could I have lived knowing what I am? I would sooner die.”

“I would sooner you didn’t,” she said. She reached out to touch his cheek, fingers callused and warm. “You’re my friend, Danse. I don’t have many, and the ones I do, I prefer to hold on to.”

“Why would you be friends with a monster?”

Moon huffed quietly to herself, sat down on the mattress beside him, looped her arm around her shoulders. He let her, was too tired and sick to fight her off. “What _is_ a monster to you, Danse? Tell me.”

“I—” he began, and then didn’t know what to say. Non-humans. Synths. Ghouls. Super Mutants. Yet. _Yet_. He had met Strong, albeit briefly. He had conversed at some length with Nick Valentine, at Cambridge Police Station, when Moon and Blackburn turned up one afternoon with some bloodied cybernetic implants and sat down on the floor in the back room to pick them apart. Danse hadn’t _liked_ Valentine, but he was a Synth falling to pieces with age, and he was amicable enough to offer around cigarettes.

Danse hadn’t liked the little ghoul in the tricorne hat, either, but he was apparently a mayor and quite a big deal, and Moon and Blackburn had made it absolutely clear that he was a valuable asset and not a target.

A ghoul was a mayor. And a beloved one, willing to walk the filthy streets with his people, at that.

It occurred to him that while he met his own definition of monster, he was a long way off from Moon’s.

“Maxson sent you?” he asked, after a long silence.

“Oh, well. I suppose. Though when I found out I would’ve come on my own to make sure you were okay,” Moon said, pressing her weight against his side. Danse didn’t realise he’d been cold until he realised how warm and alive she was.

“He didn’t want to have me killed, then?” Danse asked hopefully.

“Oh, no,” Moon said – and of course she would say it lightly like that, she didn’t seem to believe in sugar-coating the truth. “He wanted you executed. Something about making an example, blah, blah. We told him if that was the way he treated his own loyal soldiers we were quitting. He seemed more against the idea of us leaving than having you executed for whatever stupid crime that shouldn’t even be a crime.”

“Oh,” Danse said, and didn’t know what to say.

“You’re, like, temporarily banned from the Prydwen,” Moon said. “Levi and I are going to lean on him hard and see if we can’t get him to change his mind.”

Danse balked. “You can’t do that! He’s the Elder!”

“Just because someone has power doesn’t make them right,” Moon told him, firmly. “I was involved in a lot of political assassinations back in the day because of that, I’ll have you know. Tyrants. Dictators. Fascists. Corrupt officials. Greedy men and women causing large-scale suffering through selfishness. Also, once, an idiot who was elected by mistake but no one could get rid of.”

Danse wondered _when_ back in the day was, and who she’d assassinated. Who were the tyrants and dictators, and who was the idiot?

“Some of them were monsters,” she went on. “Actually, most of them were monsters. And they were as human as you come. Birthed from a human womb and everything. Just because someone contracted FEV or was exposed to radiation and turned into a ghoul or were born from a machine instead of a mother doesn’t make them a monster. It’s their actions that dictate whether or not they’re monsters.”

Danse tried to consider that but he was tired and his head hurt and he was nauseous.

“Go to sleep,” Moon said. “I’ll still be here when you wake up. And then we can have some breakfast, and we’ll go home, okay?”

He didn’t have it in him to disagree.

True to her word, she was still there when he woke again, but she wasn’t alone. Blackburn had turned up, and so had the man with the bald head and the sunglasses, and the dog was sprawled on the floor between them, snoozing lightly. Only the man with the bald head was awake, and when he noticed Danse stared he grinned, and said: “Hey, there friend. My name is Deacon. I’m here to talk to you about being a Synth and what that means for you now, but take your time. We’ll do it on your terms.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next up: the follow-up of Blind Betrayal, and the chapter after that, X6-88 and a cold war.


	8. VIII.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kind of a filler chapter to be honest. Tidying up loose ends.

**VIII.**

‘Talking about being a Synth’ was a lot more demonstrative than it sounded, and involved a visit first to a murky offshore island to visit a Synth colony called Acadia, overseen by Nick Valentine’s sort-of Synth brother, DiMA. DiMA was a calm influence surrounded by escaped Coursers and Synths and people who were maybe Synths but maybe not but wanted to be, which Danse ultimately just found confusing.

“They’re a bit like a cult, yeah,” Blackburn said, after they spent three days there.

The trip somehow segued into a visit to the Children of Atom to show Danse a “Real Cult,” Moon’s words, not Blackburn’s, nor Deacon’s. Danse had absolutely _no idea how_ , but Blackburn and Moon had convinced the Grand Zealot they were devotees of Atom and they were in relatively good social standing among the other Children – before they were abruptly called back to the mainland to help MacCready follow up a lead on a cure for his son.

They fought through a horde of ferals at an old Med-Tek facility. Danse unpleasantly reminded of the day Knight Keane died, and MacCready just as uncomfortable because his wife had been torn to shreds by ghouls back in the Capital Wasteland, which was something Danse had not known but left him feeling an unsettling sort of kinship with the dirty little mercenary.

After detouring past Goodneighbour to drop MacCready and the serum off so he could personally see his son received it, Blackburn and Moon took Danse to a falling down old church.

“Desdemona is going to be so pissed!” Deacon said gleefully, meeting them at the door and leading them down into the tunnels underneath. “Paladin Danse in the Railroad HQ.”

“Former Paladin,” Danse grumbled.

“Not yet,” Moon said. “We’re still working on Maxson. He’s a stubborn son-of-a-bitch, but we’ll get him to see reason, yet.”

“We’ve cracked tougher nuts than that trumped up whelp,” Blackburn added, and Danse couldn’t decide if he felt scorn for their disregard of the Elder, or pleased that they had decided his life was worth the effort of trying to reform the entire Brotherhood of Steel. Perhaps both were acceptable given the circumstances.

After the chaotic Railroad HQ, they escorted him to Sanctuary.

Danse had accompanied them to the fortified town before, and he was mystified as to why they liked it so much. It was just like any other settlement as far as he could tell, although there were an awful lot of Minutemen milling around. If whoever had that silly MINITEMAN GENRAL hat was not at the Castle, chances were they were in Sanctuary.

“Now, this is as close to home as we’re going to get in the short term, I reckon,” Blackburn said. “There are people in Sanctuary living in harmony and it doesn’t matter what they are. You can help out defending the town until we get you back in Maxson’s good graces. Nothing like having a job you know how to do.” They were making the ascent towards the Red Rocket truck stop before the bridge, where Danse had previously seen a man in overalls and a pompadour wig working on a nice set of Power Armour. “Of course, if you want to work with the crops or watching the kids or working on salvage, you can. Whatever floats your boat.”

“Find your niche,” Deacon said, sagely.

Danse still wondered precisely who Deacon was, and whether he was accompanying Blackburn and Moon or whether he just followed them around for the heck of it and they put him to use because he was present.

It was confusing.

He was beginning to get used to being confused.

“Also, we think the old lady is an Institute plant but we’re not completely sure. She might just be scarily good at picking up facts about people through observation and then making cryptic comments about them to freak them out, so ignore her,” Moon said.

“You haven’t acted to remove her?” Danse asked.

Moon shrugged. “We have the Institute where we want them at the moment. We don’t want to ruin a stable relationship by acting rashly.”

Danse argued that what the Institute was doing was wrong.

Moon and Blackburn and Deacon all agreed, but Moon and Blackburn didn’t think storming the place and killing everyone was the answer. There was genuinely useful technology there that could be irrevocably lost if someone was rash.

“Curing FEV might be the tip of the iceberg,” Blackburn said, then had to explain how icebergs were always much bigger than they looked. “They already have access to reliable and stable crops resistant to drought, weather, and radiation could be put into circulation above-ground in a matter of months. Better treatments for all sorts of diseases. Medication for chronic conditions that isn’t available. We just… have to convince them that the people topside aren’t a bunch of filthy savages.”

“That’s their current working hypothesis,” Moon said. “That the surface-dwellers aren’t worth their resources because they’ve regressed so far they basically aren’t human.”

“It’s all very delicate and political,” Blackburn added. “Negotiation was never really our forte. We were the strike force, the cavalry, the information gatherers, the people who left the dead drops, the wetworks team, clean-up.”

“When we woke up from cryofreeze, we didn’t think our actions would have any consequences,” Moon said. “We were two hundred years out of time. What could a couple of old geezers like us do after the apocalypse?”

“With the right sort of luck, quite a lot,” Deacon said, stepping around the skeleton of a man and onto the bridge to Sanctuary, and Danse had the sudden feeling that everyone was thinking about the MINITEMAN GENRAL hat at the same time.

“On a different note,” Moon said suddenly. “Have you heard about Nuka-World and how it’s full of raiders? Like, there are three different gangs crammed in there, living on top of each other, and it won’t be long before they set their sights east and come this way. Provided they don’t massacre each other first. But they’ve been living all squashed up in the same place for like a year, so there’s some fairly decent peacekeeper hanging around. Also, what’s your opinion on traps: go around them, disarm them, or spring them and see what happens?”

Everyone answered differently at the same time.

“Avoid them,” said Deacon, enthusiastically.

“Spring them,” said Blackburn, with a dark glint in his eye that suggested something dangerous.

“Disarm them,” Danse suggested, firmly.

“Hm,” said Moon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next up: X6-88's POV.
> 
> Then the Gauntlet at Nuka World.
> 
> Then an Institute chapter.
> 
> All of which are written already.


	9. IX.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> X6-88 disapproves but is powerless.

**IX.**

“No further attempts will be made to track down or retrieve escaped Synths,” Father announced one evening to the Institute at large. “The SRB will be closing down on a probational basis and resources assigned elsewhere, pending permanent closure.”

X6-88 was a professional. He did not gape at Father when he assigned him to assist his wayward ‘parents’ and report back on their activities. He maybe seethed internally, but he kept his expression and his voice cool and collected as he agreed to the order.

They had just come out of a meeting with the Board.

The Board looked harried and sick.

Father looked tired.

Father’s ‘parents’ looked cheerful and scruffy, their clothes ragged and bloodstained and patched with mismatching thread, their skin smudged with grease and dirt, their faces painted with concentric circles like those pesky Children of Atom.

The skirmish that was already being called the Battle of Bunker Hill had proved costly to the Institute. Mistakes would not be repeated. The Institute was being forced to take back the responsibility they imposed on the Synths that ran away. From now on, they would be treated as the Wasteland treated any other being – with ongoing hardship and the constant fear of death, but not from the Institute.

Synths were to be considered free entities on the same level as human beings.

Medical shipments and collections of resistant seed were to begin being sent to the surface, in return for specific items of scavenge useful to the other Divisions of the Institute.

It was not a victory. It was a crushing blow.

Father’s ‘parents’ had assured everyone that this was by far the lesser of two evils, and that their reactor wasn’t nearly as secure as they might like, how would they like to have a smoking crater in the ground for a place to live?

Later, as he watched them unabashedly looting the place and leaving little string of bottlecaps in the place of valuable technology, X6-88 said: “You will not threaten us into submission. That will not work.”

“Maybe,” the woman said.

“I find,” the man said. “That the threat of mutually assured destruction can go a long way to keeping things ticking over. I prefer a cold war over a hot one, any day.”

“Mutually assured destruction?” X6-88 repeated.

“All we did was level the playing field,” the man said, shrugging, picking up and microscope and examining it only to put it down, pull out a screwdriver, and pull it to pieces on the desk.

“What.”

“The Institute wants to eliminate the thorns in their side, the threats on the horizon, for the Commonwealth to be under their governance, benign or not, that they might continue their research unhindered. The Railroad, the Brotherhood of Steel. The Railroad want freedom for people they see are being subjugated, they want the kidnappings and replacements to be stopped. The Brotherhood of Steel thinks the creation of abominations goes on down here, and you need to be wiped off the map to prevent events like what happened before the bombs fell,” the man said, picking through the pieces of the microscope and pushing some to the side, unwanted, and collecting the others in a neat little pile.

“Don’t think we haven’t seen the FEV laboratory,” the woman said, from where she was sifting through information on a terminal she shouldn’t have been able to access. “That sort of experimentation on sentient beings is completely unacceptable. No more plagues introduced by man. No more people changed against their will.”

“In a way, the Brotherhood is right,” the man said.

The woman was nodding, even as she moved on to another page of green text, reading it eyes flickering back and forward quickly. “And in a way, they’re wrong. Because the Commonwealth needs the Institute. Wiping you out would be disastrous, set the people topside back hundreds of years.”

“The Minutemen,” the man said. “Just want the people of the Commonwealth to be safe and lead their lives as best they can without outside interference. And if push comes to shove, they’ll side up with the Railroad.”

“You can attack the Castle, hunt down and destroy the Railroad HQ again, shoot the Brotherhood flagship out of the air. But if you do, you’ll seal your own fate and the fate of every Synth and scientist and child down here,” the woman said. “We’ve made sure of it. Everyone knows everyone else’s weakest points, where to hit for maximum damage. Any victory any one of you achieves against the others will come at great cost, and will ultimately lead to your downfall.”

“So, the war is cold,” the man said. “You can’t do anything for fear of massive retribution. They can’t do anything for fear of retribution just as massive. It’s a great big stalemate.”

“In time, cold wars pass,” the woman said, and X6-88 hadn’t been watching her close enough because she’d pulled the power cord from the terminal and was taking it to pieces. “The next generation comes alone and thinks: ‘this is stupid, why are we arguing over this anyway?’ Walls are torn down and life goes on.”

X6-88 could not find fault in this logic.

It infuriated him.

He went to find Father, who was resting in his rooms.

“Why do we not just eliminate them and be done with it?” he asked, impatiently.

Father sighed, a long, rattling, sick sounding thing.

“Perhaps,” he said. “I am old and foolish. Perhaps I’m slipping into senility, though I should hope not. But they have done a very good job of stymying me at every turn. They are not my mother and father. I have no idea who they are. The records in the Vault were surely incorrect, and very little from those years remains intact. They are, however, very, very good at what they do.” He paused, coughed into a handkerchief, continued. “The man, who I have thought of for so long as my father but who is not, told me something the other day.”

X6-88 waited while Father took a moment to gather himself.

“He said: ‘A plant that grows in the sunshine grows slowly, but it grows healthy and strong. A plant that grows in the darkness grows tall and spindly very quickly, and if it does not find the light, it will wither and die.’ I think I understand what he means. The Institute cannot maintain its current level of progress as closed off as we are, or we will collapse upon ourselves. We must find the sunshine and bathe in it, even if it means our research takes much longer.”

“I do not understand,” X6-88 said.

Father smiled wanly. “I don’t suppose you do. It’s not in your nature. Now go, find those wayward parents of mine and keep them out of trouble. When I die, one of them will take my place as Director and lead us to glorious light.”

X6-88 thought that Father was right the first time, and that he was turning into a foolish old man.

“Whose side are they on?” X6-88 asked, at last.

Father laughed, and it turned into a coughing fit. X6-88 didn’t know what could possibly be so funny about the question. It was straightforward in his mind.

“No one’s,” Father said. “If we annoy them enough, they will descend upon us with an army of the Children of Atom, or raiders, or tame deathclaws. You cannot predict their movements. They are not like anything we know. Now shoo. Begone.” X6-88 obeyed. Just before X6-88 stepped through the door, Father said quietly: “They asked for a ‘Director Hat.’ We told them no, whoever was chosen to be Director after me would remain Director, regardless of hat status. They seemed disappointed. I think they have something clever in mind. Do try to stop them.”


	10. X.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A trap is neatly reversed.
> 
> The Overboss is not anticipated.

**X.**

A few months ago, a story trickled out of the Commonwealth and made its way to Nuka World, where Porter Gage got wind of it. A group of raiders had booby-trapped a regularly used bridge, splashing about oil, dropping down mines, laying tripwires, and leaving canisters of fuel right next to the rotting carcasses of broken down old cars – which everyone knew blew explosively under the right circumstances.

A group of the local militia, the Minutemen, led by their esteemed General, as evidenced by the presence of the General’s Hat, had approached the bridge. The raiders had held their positions, certain that they were going to deal a lethal blow to that pesky local militia, who were slowly but surely regaining a foothold in the Commonwealth and making it very hard for honest raiders to go about the business of raiding.

Instead, the woman wearing the hat had held up her hand and motioned for her companions to back off. Then she had crossed the bridge without tripping a single trap. After several minutes of consideration, where the raiders had decided to wait and watch rather than opening fire, she had crossed back, ordered her troops further back, “Unless you want a face-full of shrapnel!” had been her exact words, and then she’d plucked a frag grenade from her belt, lobbed it at the bridge, and booked it, howling with laughter as she went.

The bridge has exploded spectacularly and the militia, on the other side of the river from the severely disappointed raiders, had headed off to find a different crossing point.

The story might have stayed quiet – the raiders had failed to kill the Minuteman General, after all. It was a humiliation.

But the explosion was so grand and the canniness of that General was so good that it had to be repeated, and repeated again. It both an excellent laugh, and a terrible warning. The General was smart. The General was agile. The General might be a little bit mad. The General was the General _for a reason_.

The General blew shit up and cackled gleefully.

Porter Gage was not thinking of the General when the trap at the end of the monorail line into Nuka World was sprung. Perhaps he should have been. Instead he was incredulous, and angry, and at the same time wondering if maybe, just maybe, _this was it_. Maybe they would be free of Colter for good.

Somehow, ten people and a dog stepped out of the monorail to crowd the platform.

The Gauntlet was not made for ten people plus dog. It was meant to be run by _one_ person at a time.

Gage wasn’t sure whether to sing Harvey’s praises, or curse the man. One thing was certain: Harvey shouldn’t have given the password to such a big group of people. One or two, maybe, but _ten_?

Perhaps they had threatened him. Perhaps he was already dead.

A man and a woman, both in Vault Suits, led the way out of the monorail. A red-headed woman with a smattering of freckles and an aluminium baseball bat wrapped with barbed wire followed with the strapping war dog at her side. A man with a bald head and sunglasses slid out shiftily, followed by another man, one who’d killed an Institute Courser and stolen his uniform, or was _an actual Institute Courser_ , glaring and suspicious. Then there was a tall, broad-shouldered man wearing a Brotherhood of Steel flightsuit. Another woman, this one with short hair and a chequered shirt and an open curious face. A woman in a red cap and a red jacket, a pencil tucked behind one ear. A ghoul in jeans and a T-shirt and a tricorne hat. An old model Synth is ratty clothes.

It was the most ragtag group Porter Gage had ever laid eyes on, and he’d met some really patchy raider groups before.

Perhaps that’s why Harvey had sent them on in together, even though the group was large.

RedEye cast a sideways glance at Gage from their post overlooking the Gauntlet.

“What do we do?” he asked.

Gage considered.

“Let them run the Gauntlet,” he said, at last. “If they make it to the Overboss without all dying, we’ll lock the doors and insist they only send one champion through. Colter should accept that. I’ll go warn him.”

Colter was cross, and Gage had to dodge a swipe at his head, but he eventually agreed. One champion could come through the door. When they died, the next one could take a shot at him. But they weren’t all to rush him at once. Colter disliked chaos.

Gage didn’t mention the Courser to him. No use stirring the pot.

He didn’t think this would be their chance to take the Overboss down, the doubt had already set in, the group that had just entered the Gauntlet was too haphazard, but maybe the next person Harvey lured in… Might have to replace Harvey, after this stunt, if he hadn’t taken the chance to bolt, if he wasn’t a splat on the wall in the monorail station back in the Commonwealth.

Gage returned to the high up spot where RedEye was commentating, and he could watch the progress of their victims through the Gauntlet.

It turned out to be, quite possibly, the most boring Gauntlet run anyone had ever seen. There were a couple of interesting seconds, when the man in the Vault Suit first stepped into the room with the turrets and almost got torn to shreds by a storm of bullets, but he darted back the way he’d come.

What followed was a gruelling three-day event. They had to rotate out commentators every four hours or so, and after the first night didn’t even both with commentary at night time.

The group _crawled_ through the Gauntlet, taking turrets apart, disarming tripwires, disassembling traps, making their way cautiously across rotting gangplanks, peering around corners, edging along hallways like the floor might give out at any moment and sent them plummeting to their dooms.

They tried sending some of the Pack’s war dogs in to harry them.

The dogs were butchered, the woman in the Vault Suit put her pipe wrench through a wooden door and reduced it to kindling, and Gauntlet victims sat around roasting mutt chops and then spent half the day napping.

The Pack steadfastly refused to waste any more dogs on them.

They tried to herd a gatorclaw out of the Safari Park and into the Gauntlet just to spice things up, but gave up after four people were mauled to death.

It was terrible.

Worst Gauntlet run they’d ever had.

There were no glorious deaths, and few horrific injuries.

The man in the Vault Suit took some shrapnel from a grenade bouquet at one point, but not enough to seriously incapacitate or kill him, and he anticlimactically pulled the shrapnel out with his own fingers, stitched himself up, and kept going. The young woman with red hair fell from one of the board-walks at one point, suffered a compound to her wrist, and for a moment it looked like the Mirelurks might get her.

But she hefted her barbed-wire baseball bat in her undamaged hand and walloped to nearest Mirelurk in the face with it, and then everyone had joined the fray and the Mirelurks were dead too, their carapaces cracked open to get at the meat underneath.

The wide-eyed woman with the short hair and the chequered shirt turned out to be an adept medic, and within an hour the broken wrist had been realigned, bandaged, and splinted up and the red-headed woman, sleepy from Med-X and the effects of the stimpaks, was being given a piggy-back ride by the bald man with the sunglasses.

Everyone had learned some interesting new combinations of swearwords while the read-head, who they all learned was called Cait, was getting her arm set.

At last, sheer luck and caution making up for their slow and bumbling incompetence, they reached the locker room and were locked in, and someone went to retrieve Colter.

By then Gage had been awake for nearly four days straight, and he was ready to fall over from exhaustion.

He didn’t see the trap for what it was.

He buzzed them on the intercom. Told them about the electrical grid Colter’s Power Armour was hooked up to. Told them about the weapon hidden in one of the lockers. Listened to their incredulous laughter at the sight of the water pistol.

“It’d work, though,” the man in the Brotherhood of Steel flight suit, the man Gage had learned was called Danse, said. “Also, that’s a terrible way to treat Power Armour. It’ll be ruined for anything else.”

“One champion at a time to face Colter,” Gage told them, tiredly, too exhausted to discuss the workings of Power Armour right that moment. “Who wants to die first?”

“I will do it,” the Courser said, and he was definitely a Courser, no human being spoke that blandly.

“No,” Cait said. “ _I_ want a shot at him.” Her bad arm was tucked close to her chest, but even from all the way across the arena Gag could see her stormy expression and the way the fingers on her good hand clenched and unclenched.

“What’s taking so long?” Colter bellowed from the middle of the arena.

“Count me out,” the bald little man, Deacon, said, and Gage wasn’t surprised.

“And me,” the ghoul agreed. “I have people counting on me back home, you know. I’m not here to duel to the death.”

“I, ah, I’ll document the fight,” the woman in the red cap and jacket said.

“I am not very good at combat,” Curie, the medic in the chequered shirt said, voice heavily accented. “Perhaps it should be someone else.”

“What do we get if we kill him?” the woman in the Vault Suit asked.

Gage glanced at Nisha, who was beside him, wondering whether he should answer. Nisha rubbed her nose, then nodded.

“You become the new Overboss,” he said quietly, so quietly Colter wouldn’t hear him.

“Does the title come with a hat?” the woman asked.

 _What?_ Gage thought.

“What?” Nisha said.

“If you win, you can have any hat you want,” Gage said, a little uncertainly.

“I’ll do it,” the woman in the Vault Suit said cheerfully, hefting her pipe wrench. Only now did Porter Gage notice the concentric circles painted on her forehead and around her left eye. A Child of Atom. Stolen Vault Suit, then? He felt a cold sort of dread, low in his belly. “Let me through.”

She cracked Colter’s Power Armour like she cracked the carapaces of the Mirelurks, driving the spike of her modded wrench into the vulnerable spaces in the armour and tearing it apart with strength no human being should possess. She must have bones of concrete and rebar and tendons of wire. Atom had blessed her, _somehow_ , because Colter died choking on his own blood, that nasty hook embedded in his neck and through his windpipe.

She didn’t even use the squirt gun.

“I think we’re in trouble,” Gage muttered to Nisha, who had turned a sort of greyish colour under her helmet.

He was about ready to convert.

It was only much, much later that he would realise the trap had been reversed. The large group, their slow and halting and extraordinary cautious progress through the Gauntlet had been intended to lull them into a false sense of security. Make Colter overconfident. The ragtag nature of their party was also meant to blind an enemy to their lethal efficiency. After all, how could a Courser, an old-model Synth, a pair of Vault Dwellers, a ghoul, a couple of frightened hangers-on, and a Brotherhood of Steel soldier work together as a cohesive team?

The answer was they had fought many battles by each other’s sides before, and were prepared to die for each other. They knew who had their back and who had their flank. They knew there would be no friendly fire, because the people behind them were competent marksmen. They knew how to patch each other up and were prepared to carry a member of the team if they couldn’t keep going.

And, ultimately, they knew they were holding a live grenade, and when they were confronted with the final trap, the one that was supposed to explode in their faces and kill them all, they lobbed that grenade into the mix and backed off. Porter Gage realised that was how Nuka World was overthrown by a band of misfits – who turned out to be the same bloody militia who’d blown up the bridge all those months ago.

At least the Minuteman General was a competent Overboss, even if she delegated a lot. Cait and the Courser were her enforcers, brutal, efficient, merciless when needed. The Brotherhood of Steel solider helped with the logistics of food and water distribution. The ghoul, who turned out to be _Mayor Hancock from fucking Goodneighbour_ , nobody could believe it, organised a rotational security force with representatives from all three gangs, before vanishing off to go be mayor where he belonged.

If there was a crime that could not be easily solved, the enforcers were sent out to prevent skirmishes between the gangs, and the ragged old Synth was sent to get to the bottom of it so the perpetrator could be caught.

Within weeks, the Pack, the Disciples, and the Operators found themselves allocated land and resources and policed so heavily they didn’t dare step out of line.

There was one nice surprise: the General of the Minutemen didn’t kill everyone and the whole amusement park started working together like a well-oiled machine.

Who woulda thought.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next: A new chapter of the Institute.
> 
> Later: The bewildering and highly representative peace summit.
> 
> Later still: Basically epilogue.
> 
> Even later: In the year 2281, in the Mojave Desert, there was a man who was shot twice in the face and lived...
> 
> FUCK CHRONOLOGY YO


	11. XI.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Levi and Lane go back to the Institute.

**XI.**

Father slipped into a sudden and rapid decline one sunny morning in the early summer. A Courser was despatched to retrieve Levi and Lane, who had until then been cheerfully chasing gatorclaws through the Safari Park for Cito and his family of real life gorillas. They returned to the Commonwealth immediately, went straight to the relay built at Sanctuary, and stepped inside, arriving at the Institute in the early afternoon of that exact same day, exhausted and dirty.

Father was barely conscious when they arrived in his rooms, his face gaunt and sallow, his hands clawed, his hair thinner than ever.

He smiled at them feebly, eyes glassy and unfocused.

“Good,” he rasped. “You made it. Mother. Father.”

Levi and Lane glanced at each other, and this time neither corrected the old man. If he wanted them to be his parents, so be it. Here they were.

“When I was a little boy, I often wondered about you,” Father said, voice a dry whisper, like old leaves blowing in the wind. “When I was older, I had more responsibilities, and I forgot my wonderings. But then I became ill. And you entered my thoughts once again. I was _so_ curious. I had to know you, before I died.”

“Did it help?” Lane asked.

“Yes and no. You were not what I expected. You brought unwelcome news. Things I did not want to hear.” He closed his eyes. Sighed. Coughed weakly. “I want you to do something for me.”

“I think we’re already doing quite a lot,” Levi said, and Lane boxed his ears.

“It’ll depend on the request,” she said. “But we have pull. We can see what we can do.”

Father didn’t say anything for a very long time. And then he said: “I want you to raise the boy. Give him the childhood I never had. Make it a happy one.”

“What boy?”

Father opened his eyes, blinked at them blearily, a frown creasing his brow. “The child Synth. Shaun. I’ve already had his memories modified. He believes you are his parents.”

Lane had nothing to say to that. Levi, apparently, didn’t either, because they both sat there, dumbstruck for several long seconds.

“Where is he?” she asked, eventually.

“Downstairs, doing his homework,” Father said.

He closed his eyes again, let out a long, rattling sigh.

“The pain is very bad,” he admitted. “Not even the best medication can take the edge off any longer. It won’t be long, now. Father, you will be chosen to be the Director.”

“Why me?” Levi demanded.

The corners of Father’s lips curled upwards, and this time it might have been a smile but it might also have been a grimace. “It would have been Mother, but our watchers reported that she recently became the Overboss of a number of raider gangs out at that old amusement park. The Board deemed she had enough on her plate already, and the position should go to you.”

Levi swore softly in Afrikaans, then said: “Fair enough.”

Father suddenly grunted, face contorting in pain, breath hissing between clenched teeth. “Mother,” he gasped. “Will you hold my hand?”

Lane wasn’t sure. He was a stranger. Yet. Once upon a time, she had been responsible for him. Once upon a time he had been a sweet little baby with a gurgling laugh and dark eyes, no dissimilar to Chiharu when she was a baby. Not so long ago, really, less than a conscious year.

She took his hand. It was cold and weak. The bones felt like bird’s bones beneath her fingers, and the skin like tissue paper, so soft and dry she could crush it without meaning to.

Sometime later, a doctor came in and checked on Father. He left again, and maybe twenty minutes after the Board came and joined their vigil, crowding into the back of the room but trying to remain unobtrusive. Lane ignored the soft sniffles and clearing of throats behind her, and listened instead to the faltering heartbeat in Father’s chest, counting the seconds between each one as they grew longer and longer, and then ceased.

She placed Father’s limp hand on the bed by his side, brushed the hair from his forehead, and smoothed the expression of pain from his face with her fingertips.

The doctor came and listened to Father’s chest with a stethoscope, murmured: “He’s gone.”

Lane got to her feet and left Levi to face to Board as the new Director.

She followed the sound of soft sobbing down the stairs, to a darkened little bedroom, where she found the child Synth huddled in a ball beneath his covers. She was uncertain how to approach this child, who apparently now believed he was hers, but although she had moved with the quietness of a whisper of wind, he seemed to sense her presence and peered out from his shell of blankets.

“Mama?” he said, voice a quiet, broken little thing.

Lane had been a mother before. She had raised Chiharu, and Anastasia, her own two girls, to successful adulthood. She had helped Kittredge with the horde of children he’d managed to produce, from asthmatic Toby, a scrappy kid who never forgot a grudge, to the sixth and youngest child, sweet little Alice, who was an amazing kleptomaniac.

She was not lost. She knew what to do. She sat down on the bed beside the curled up little lump and place her hand roughly where she thought the boy’s back was, moving it in gentle circles.

“I’m here, little man,” she said, and smiled quietly to herself because that was what Kittredge used to call Toby, way back when.

A very congested sounding sniffle. She glanced around the room for tissues and found none.

“Father’s dying, isn’t he?”

“Father?” she asked, for clarification.

“Not Dad,” the boy said. “Father. The boss guy in charge of everyone. He was real nice to me.”

And Lane felt a wave of relief wash over her, because whatever memory modifications had been done to the child were not that bad, not so severe. Just a tweak here and there, recognition, a change of childish loyalty, but not a major mind wipe like they did in the Memory Den. It would have felt wrong to have performed such a drastic and irreversible act on something that was, for all intents and purposes, a child who could not consent.

It was still awful that Father had felt the necessity to mess with the boy’s mind in the first place. But it could have been so much worse.

“Father has passed away,” she said gently. “He was in very bad pain, and now he isn’t.”

A hitching sob from beneath the blankets.

“I d-didn’t want him to die,” the little boy wailed.

Lane removed her hand, peeled the blankets back, hefted the child into her arms – he was ten, maybe, not a small, small boy, but small enough for this – and hugged him close. He smelled like soap and little boy.

“I know,” she murmured, rocking him gently, and the memory alteration must have been quite comprehensive because the child clung to her and pressed his forehead against her shoulder, completely trusting. “I know. No one wants someone we like to die.”

“Then why’s it have to happen?” Shaun cried.

“Because that’s life. It goes around in a big circle. People, plants, animals, they grow old and die, and their bodies nourish other plants and animals and people. From death, life. From life, death. And on, and on, and on, always. Surely you’ve covered this in your biology homework.”

“Uh-huh.”

He wiped his nose on her shoulder. She ignored the wet feeling.

“Do you want to come upstairs and say goodbye to Father? He can’t hear you anymore, but saying goodbye is important.”

Even in the dark, she could see the uncertainty in his expression. At length, he said: “Okay.”


	12. XII.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I forgot I'd written like another three chapters for this. Woops.

**XII.**

It was a long way from the Capital Wasteland to the Commonwealth on foot, especially with a small child. MacCready bought a brahmin, packed up the belongings he’d left at the farmstead in the Wasteland, thanked the couple who lived there who had watched over his son for so long while he sought a cure, and headed for Sanctuary.

The return trip took twice as long as the outgoing one because Duncan was thin and frail and tired easily. Some of the time he walked at his father’s side, his little hand in MacCready’s pointing out this and that as they past. The rest of the time, MacCready lifted him onto the brahmin’s back, where he sat safe between the two large bags containing everything they owned.

The summer sun was hot, and as midday neared MacCready would search for a tree or an old building to shelter under, where they might nap the warmest hours of the day away, and continue traveling only as the sun drew near the horizon.

“Where are we going, Pa?” Duncan asked, almost every day.

He never seemed to get tired of MacCready’s descriptions of the Commonwealth, or Sanctuary, or the Bosses.

“Will there be other kids?” he asked.

And MacCready would reply that there would be one or two, but the settlement they were heading for wasn’t that big and there weren’t that many children. Just a few amongst the refugee families who’d been chased off their farms, who would be leaving again when the Minutemen cleared their homes out.

Duncan did not seem to be disappointed by this prospect, somehow.

“How long will we be living there?” he asked.

MacCready didn’t know how to tell him he wasn’t sure. That they would stay as long as possible, but the Commonwealth was just as dangerous as the Capital Wasteland, and he didn’t know what the future held.

At long last they reached Boston, where they joined up with a caravan headed north from Goodneighbour, and made their way to Sanctuary, past the bustling settlements of the Drive-In and Red Rocket.

The skeleton of the man who had died in front of the bridge to Sanctuary had been propped up on a pole beside it, now, with a sign hanging beneath it reading: RADERS BEWAIR. A dog barked, and Duncan went stiff with fright on top of the brahmin, but MacCready would recognise that bark anywhere.

Sure enough, there was Bo, the strapping black and tan dog with the dark face and the pointed ears, galloping across the bridge with his tongue lolling from his mouth.

“Hey, boy,” MacCready said, kneeling to greet the dog with an affectionate scratch under the chin.

The brahmin lowed anxiously.

“ _Pa_ ,” Duncan wailed.

He’d seen too many mangy feral dogs with wild eyes and slavering mouths rush them to be comfortable. MacCready chuckled and told him about the dogs that used to hang about Little Lamplight, all half-a-dozen of them, and the puppies they had once or twice a year, to the delight of all the children.

The turrets turned as they walked past, but did not spin up and fire, and they stepped through the high arching gate at the end of the bridge into Sanctuary proper. To their right was a golden field of razorgrain waving in the breeze, seed-heads ripening under the summer sun. To their left were the raised beds where the mutfruit were grown in rows, and beyond them lines of tatos and carrots, gourds and melons, and high stalks of corn, ears just beginning to appear.

“Hey, MacCready!” Preston Garvey called down to them from atop a guard tower, waving and grinning.

“Hi, Garvey!” MacCready called back. “Where’re the Bosses?”

Garvey made a vague motion towards the ramshackle collection of buildings toward the end of the street, clustered around a big old oak tree in broken out in green leaves. “About,” he said, but did not specify. “Who’s the kid?”

“This is my son, Duncan!”

“He looks well,” Garvey called, and MacCready felt a swelling of hope. “Hey there, Duncan. I’m Preston Garvey. I’m in charge of the security in this settlement. You reckon you can be a good boy?”

“Yeah!” Duncan yelled, enthusiastically.

“Good, because your old man is a right troublemaker, and I don’t need two of you!”

MacCready led the brahmin by its lead rope towards the house he’d been sharing with Danse and Cait. He knocked on the front door and yelled inside, but the house stood quiet and empty but for the electric hum of the lightbulbs, so he hitched the brahmin to the post out front, lifted his kid down, and started to haul things through to the little room at the back where he slept.

“Is this our new house?” Duncan asked, poking around with a childish sort of wonder.

The farmstead had only had two rooms, both cramped, with low ceilings and a persistent draft.

Here, there might’ve been a draft, but there was also a bathroom and room enough that no one had to share a mattress for lack of space. MacCready didn’t want to know how the Bosses had got the indoor plumbing working again, and he wasn’t about to ask, but he was sure pleased for it on those awful winter days where radioactive sleet was coming down in a torrent and he didn’t have to duck out to an outhouse.

“It’s amazing, Pa,” Duncan breathed, climbing onto the dusty old armchair to peer out the window into the street. “There’s so many people!”

“Come on,” MacCready said, ushering him through to their room, where there was a bed pushed up against the wall between a desk and a filing cabinet with a sleeping roll laid out at its foot. “This is us. Put your clothes in that cabinet there, would you?”

The dinner bell rang shortly after MacCready had turned the brahmin out in the field where rusting playground equipment stuck up out of the yellow summer grass and a trio of brahmin were already grazing idly.

“There you go, Bess,” he said, patting her on the shoulder and closing the gate behind her. “Enjoy your new home.”

Bess lowed, both heads at once, and the other brahmin stopped to look at her, but they were used to the comings and goings of trader’s beasts of burden, and were unbothered by their new pasture mate.

MacCready escorted Duncan to the ramshackle mess hall where dinner was served at five o’clock every evening, rain or shine, unless the settlers were out taking pot-shots at raiders or Super Mutants. They met the Boss Lady, Nora, at the door.

“Creeds!” she exclaimed, happily, giving him a brief but rib-creaking embrace before stepping back to regard him thoughtfully. He often wondered how such a small woman could be so strong. Being hugged by her was like being gripped by a vice and squeezed. She had changed her war paint, MacCready noticed. No more concentric circles – she was wearing the black bars of a raider now.

“You’re back!” she chattered. “It’s been an age. You’re all tanned. And this must be Duncan. You look well.”

“Thank you,” Duncan said, shyly, and MacCready could feel him creeping further behind his back.

Fair enough. Boss Lady could be a bit much sometimes.

But then.

“Mama!” Another small boy, all dark hair and dark eyes and freckles, bounced over. He was dressed impeccably, like a child straight from before the war, striped shirt and jeans and tidy little shoes that were not held together with twine or duct tape.

“MacCready,” Nora said. “This is Shaun, my son. He must be about – uh – two years older than Duncan? Shaun, why don’t you take Duncan up to the serving table and show him what’s the best.”

“’Kay,” Shaun said, grabbing Duncan by the hand and pulling him away.

MacCready stared. “I thought your kid was like, sixty, and the Director of the Institute.”

“Long story,” Nora said.

MacCready had a funny feeling that everything that ever happened when she or the Boss Man were around was a _long story_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I always hate that we never find out what happens to Duncan in the end. Does he get cure on time? Does he live? Does cure work? So many questions not answered.


	13. XIII.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This week on I forgot I was writing a fic and was already halfway through the final chapter but somehow neglected to update:
> 
> AN UPDATE.
> 
> There's like 2 chapters after this and then it's done.

**XIII.**

The day that would become the Commonwealth Peace Summit dawned like any other.

It was late summer. The heat of yesterday had not abated and Arthur Maxson woke up uncomfortably warm and with no idea what the day held in store. He picked over his breakfast, read through the latest communications from the Proctors, replied to the one from Ingram about _Liberty Prime_ , ignored one from Knight-Captain Cade, showered briskly to conserve water, got dressed, and went to discuss the day-to-day affairs of keeping the Brotherhood of Steel afloat with Lancer Captain Kells.

Paladin Blackburn and Paladin Moon were out on a mission for Ingram, collecting the necessary ingredients to make fuel for the _Prydwen_ ’s engines.

It was the sort of mission that had to be completed semi-regularly, or run the risk of the Brotherhood flagship running into the ground, which meant it was a convenient method of getting Blackburn and Moon out of everyone’s hair on a semi-regular basis.

They were incredibly competent Paladins, of that Maxson was utterly certain. They just had an irritating way of undermining his authority and making him feel like a child again. And they could not, under any circumstances, be allowed to become enemies of the Brotherhood of Steel. That way lay nothing but death and ruin.

Knight-Captain Cade’s reports said as much. As did the reports from the Knights out in the field, and the Vertibird pilots who had to pick them up periodically when they threw down a signal grenade for pick-up – usually from odd and dangerous locales, including but not limited to _the middle of the Glowing Sea_ where they would be found in nothing but their flight suits with bloodshot eyes and bleeding gums.

The Knights reported seeing Blackburn fight a raider in full power armour with his bare hands, and win. They reported that Moon took a close-range torso shot from a shotgun, fell down, spat blood and buckshot, got back up and beat the man who shot her to death with his own gun. She should have been _dead_ , bled out, suffocated on her own blood. Instead, there was a puckered pink scar and she would sometimes cough up bits of lead shot.

The Vertibird pilots reported that they had to adjust the ‘birds as if they were taking on someone in full power armour whenever one of them got aboard, as if they weighed three or four times what they should.

Knight-Captain Cade reported that they weren’t synths, not any sort he’d come across, and he wasn’t sure the Institute even had this kind of technology. Moon and Blackburn were something new. Or something very, _very_ old. How was it possible for someone to have quadruple the normal bone density, or triple the usual muscle density, to heal from what should have been a lethal injury overnight and with minimal discomfort – to act as if they’d hardly even felt it to begin with, get up and keep fighting.

They weren’t normal, that much Maxson was sure, but as far as anyone could rightly tell they were as human as the next man or woman.

Just – _more_.

Maybe everyone from before the War was like that? Probably not. They didn’t match up to any pre-War records the Brotherhood had found.

So, it was that Maxson found himself peering out the windows of the observation deck, chewing the inside of his cheek, and worrying about the crew of the Vertibird that was taken down by Super Mutants south of Boston three days ago. He was not expecting Paladin Blackburn or Paladin Moon to arrive on the Prydwen that day – it should have taken them at least another week or two to find the amount of coolant Ingram had asked for this time, which was several times what was required but Maxson had wanted them out from under foot for a while.

He was not expecting one of the knights out on the flight deck to yell: “It’s a _Courser_!” or for a gunshot to ring out in the still, muggy air.

And he was definitely not expecting Paladin Blackburn to bellow: “ _Hold your fucking fire. Were you born from your mother’s ass? No? Then fucking act like it!_ ”

But there was no way of mistaking Paladin Blackburn for anyone else, because no one else had quite the same way with words.

Inwardly, Maxson groaned. Outwardly, he straightened his back, took a deep breath, and turned to face the source of at least half his current problems.

Paladin Blackburn was wearing an impeccable white lab coat with a read embroidered logo over the left breast of a man with four arms and four legs inside a circle as he stepped onto the observation deck. It was the Institute logo as shown to him by Doctor Madison Li. He was flanked on one side by Paladin Moon, wearing her Brotherhood issue flightsuit except for _that hat_ , the one with MINITEMAN GENRAL stitched on the front, and on the other side by a bald man with a wide grin and glasses who seemed vaguely familiar for reasons Maxson could not elaborate on.

Following behind them was, indeed, a Courser, tall, with dark skin and a flat expression, but he was accompanied by a short man with a green cap, bad teeth, and a rifle over his shoulder who was also inexplicably familiar. And behind them, lingering uncomfortably was Danse, who Maxson resolved to deal with, but not before he’d sorted out this impromptu get-together on the command deck.

He was about to address Paladin Blackburn when he recognised the little man with the bad teeth and the rifle.

“MacCready?” he said, incredulously, because he’d last seen the mayor of Little Lamplight all the way back in Little Lamplight, in the Capital Wasteland, and somehow had failed to imagine him growing up.

“You turned into the biggest mungo of the lot,” MacCready said, sniffing disdainfully, and the man with the bald head and the sunglasses hastily stifled a laugh.

Blackburn clapped his hands, drawing everyone’s attention back to him. “Good morning, Elder Maxson,” he said, more formally than usual because he _usually_ called Maxson ‘Whelp.’ “Excuse me for not making a prior appointment, but I was afraid you would refuse to see me. Today, I appear before you as Director Blackburn, representing the ongoing interests of the Institute in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for a peace summit. Shall we take a seat while we wait for the others to arrive?”

It was phrased as a question, but Maxson felt the imminent threat there. He sat. He wondered if he could call in one of the knights stationed as guards just outside the door, command them to gun Blackburn down, and decided it would be a bloodbath that would probably end with the Prydwen in the sea. No, he’d better hold his tongue and see what this was about.

Director of the Institute, though.

“You should send for Field Scribe Haylen,” Paladin Moon said. “You’ll want a witness for this, and someone to make a copy of the agreed upon treatise. I’ll get someone to fetch her, shall I?”

She poked her head out the door, spoke softly to one of the knights, and he scurried off to find the Scribe. Then she returned and took a seat between Blackburn and Danse, and said: “You’re the only one who is not aware of the roles of the delegation we bring before you today. I am General Yatagarasu, of the Commonwealth Minutemen. I represent the ongoing interests of the free people of the Commonwealth at this peace summit. I also represent the Children of Atom branch from the Island.”

“You know me already,” MacCready said. “I’m Robert Joseph MacCready, here as witness of the Commonwealth Minutemen.”

The man with the bald head and the sunglasses grinned widely. “You don’t remember me, but I remember you. Once upon a time, I helped clean up the water in the Capital Wasteland. You can call me Deacon, but that isn’t my real name. I represent the Railroad and the ongoing interests of the free Synths of the Commonwealth at this peace summit.”

Haylen snuck into the room and sat down at the back, tense and pale.

Maxson’s gaze slid to Danse, who shifted uncomfortably but met his gaze. “I am Danse, also known as the Synth unit designation M7-97,” he said. “Formerly of the Brotherhood of Steel. I am here today representing the interests of the Colony of Acadia.”

Before Maxson could comment, the Courser said: “I am X6-88. I am here as a witness on behalf of the Institute.”

The whirr and clunk of a Vertibird docking.

Blackburn leapt up and raced out onto the deck, shouting: “If any one of you shoots, I’ll throw you off the bow and use your mangled corpse as fertiliser for my thistle garden!”

When he came back several minutes later, he was accompanied by a ghoul, a woman in a red cap and jacket with a pencil behind one ear and a pad in her hand, a man with the most uncomfortable-looking eyepatch Maxson had ever seen in his life, a Super Mutant, a very old man who brought the smell of the ocean and whiskey inside with him, and an older generation Synth, clothes and body both tattered and worn.

Maxson was beginning to feel more sweaty and anxious, and his breath came in shallow rasps.

“Hey, there,” the woman in the red jacket said, sitting down and pulling the pencil from behind her ear. “Blue tells me you’re already halfway done with the introductions. Hi. I’m Acolyte Piper Wright. I represent Commonwealth branch of the Children of Atom. Not that they really care about these peace talks, but, you know, I think it’s important that they receive fair representation at something of this magnitude.”

The tatty old Synth introduced himself as Nick Valentine, here on behalf of the residents of Diamond City. He mentioned that Piper might had also filled this role, but if she did they would have had no representative for the Commonwealth Children of Atom.

The old man was Old Longfellow, here on behalf of the people of Far Harbour.

“Strong here for Super Mutant brothers,” the Super Mutant said. “Talk useless, but Strong make sure puny humans play no tricks,”

A bead of sweat trickled down Maxson’s spine.

Field Scribe Haylen’s expression was twisted up, and Maxson had the sneaking suspicion that she had met this particular Super Mutant before.

The man with the eye patch was a surprise. “Hi, there,” he said, scratching the back of his neck self-consciously. “I’m – ah – I’m Porter Gage, and I’m here as a representative of the gangs of Nuka World at this peace summit. That is, I’m a representative of the Disciples, the Operators, and the Pack. Since, uh, the Overboss didn’t think it was her place to be representative at this here venue.”

“What?” Maxson said.

“We annexed Nuka World a few months ago,” Paladin Moon said, coolly, and Maxson wondered who ‘ _we_ ’ was. He decided he didn’t want to know, and refrained from asking.

“Guess I’m last,” the little ghoul said. “I’m Mayor Hancock, here representing the interests of the free people of Good Neighbour. Of the people, for the people, you get my drift?”

“Everyone is here. Those who need witnesses have witnesses provided, and we have two different people to write up the accords, which will be published in Diamond City tomorrow and sent out by caravan to every corner of the Commonwealth the day after,” Paladin Blackburn said. “So, let’s begin.”

Maxson made a lot of concessions that day, but managed to hold on to enough of the core values of the Brotherhood of Steel that he felt capable of putting his name down on the hastily drafted peace treaty.

He felt like a small child again, but he wasn’t an idiot, and he knew what was best for the Brotherhood.


	14. XIV.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last chapter is completed and will be posted when I remember lol

**XIV.**

And so, at the end of that summer the Commonwealth, once a fractured land comprised of factions that had been warring for years, fell into a state of relative peace. Much like at Nuka World, mixed units were sent out to police the land, but they found themselves more and more often called to aid people in removing ferals and clearing out dangerous monsters than dealing with raiders.

Some of the Super Mutant tribes didn’t agree to the treaty and continued to wage war on the people, and so they were eliminated, but others threw down arms and took up the fight, cheerfully pitting themselves against Mirelurks and deathclaws that the humans and the synths didn’t want to tackle alone.

Infrastructure was booming. The Institute had begun to build a small settlement in the ruins of CIT, and people from all over the Commonwealth could travel there for health care inaccessible anywhere else. Caravans ferried more effective medications out and into the surrounding areas. Bottles of water purification tablets were spread far and wide. Infections that would have been lethal were treatable, vaccinations were given to the young and the old, and plagues became nothing more than passing viruses, to be endured but survived.

Electricity spread like wildfire. Fusion technology was at its core. People no longer had to strain by lamplight to see at night – settlements were lit up like the cities of old.

One warm afternoon, Levi and Lane found themselves sitting on the roof of their house, enjoying the autumn sunshine. MacCready was sitting by the edge, his feet dangling off, while beneath them Shaun and Duncan napped peacefully in the warm living room, contentedly full of dinner.

Danse, who had opted to stay at the Brotherhood outpost established at Boston Airport when the Prydwen ultimately left to return to the Capital Wasteland, was visiting. He claimed it was to see his best dog, Bo, but everyone knew he was really there to spend time with Lane, who was inordinately fond of him for all his prickliness.

They were passing around a bottle of bourbon. It was quiet but for the sound of leaves blowing down the street and the brahmin lowing to each other in the field. They had acquired a bull, and next year there would be calves.

All was well.

“What are you going to do now?” MacCready asked, breaking the comfortable silence at last.

“Hm,” Lane said. “Not sure.”

There was a protocol for agents who found themselves out in the cold in a foreign country with no ability to contact their handlers, or their local Outpost, or the Directorate, for orders. They were to dig in, secure the area, make sure they had somewhere safe to retreat to, and then wait for an opportunity to reach out.

There were further protocols, ones about concealing their identities and laying low, but Levi and Lane had decided they didn’t matter, not when they could walk up to one person and tell them they were the President of the USSA and then walk up to the next and tell them they were the most wanted terrorist in history and have _neither_ person bat an eyelid.

They had done what they could. They secured their immediate surrounds. They scouted further. They ingratiated themselves with the people in power of the local factions. They worked their way into positions of power. They secured Boston. There was somewhere safe to retreat to, now, a place with a stable economy and population where they could easily take on a role and lay low.

It was time to think about reaching out, looking for their handlers to see if they were still alive, hunting down old team members who _should_ still be alive and kicking unless they’d eaten a bullet in despair, searching the old Outposts – there was one in Alaska and another in Seattle and a third in Brazil – perhaps finding people to fill the roles of the Directorate.

“You’re not staying, are you?” MacCready asked, and there was a tightness in his voice that suggested he was holding back some sort of strong emotion.

Lane didn’t understand. Levi mustn’t have, either, for he said: “What do you mean?”

“You’re going to leave,” MacCready said. He said it without looking at either of them, staring south towards Boston proper.

“We leave Sanctuary all the time,” Levi said. “We all do. There’s always a caravan headed down Quincy way that needs an extra hand, or someone who’s had a molerat brood mother move in under their house who needs help getting rid of her and all her kids.”

“I think he means the Commonwealth,” Danse said, very quietly.

“Oh,” Levi said. “Well.”

Lane cleared her throat. “We’ll always come back. It’s not like we can take Shaun traipsing across the continent. Not until he’s eighteen _at least_.”

“And the longest trip we were thinking of in the immediate term was hopping across to the Mojave,” Levi said. “We won’t go until spring, and it’ll be a three-month round trip, max. Less if we can convince Maxson to lend us a Vertibird.”

“The _Mojave_?” MacCready repeated, incredulously, his voice cracking.

“We heard a rumour from one of the caravan hands who came up from the Capital Wasteland two weeks back. There’s a man over there who single-handedly led the city of New Vegas to independence, _after_ taking a point-blank bullet to the face a few years back. He’s been quiet for a while since, but we have a funny feeling about him, and we want to check it out,” Levi explained. “’Course, we’ll come back whether our hunch pans out or not.”

“We just have to be certain,” Lane said.

“I wish I could come with you,” MacCready said.

“You could, you know,” Levi offered. It was not a magnanimous offer – just the pointing out of a fact.

He hunched his shoulders. “I worry about leaving Duncan again so soon.”

Lane laid back on the warm sheets of metal of the roof to look up at the clouds, highlighted by the setting sun. If she tipped her head back, she could see Danse sitting criss-cross-applesauce above and behind her, his expression pensive.

“They’re safe here,” she said. “The kids. Jun and Marcy can help keep an eye on them, and Sturges would never let anything happen while the town is under his watch. By the way, did you know Jun and Marcy are expecting? By the end of winter there should be a new little girl or boy to keep Sanctuary awake all night with its squalling.”

MacCready almost fell off the roof. “Really?” he said, misery temporarily abating. “How do you know?”

Lane tapped the side of her nose and winked. “Secret.”

The sun dipped below the horizon. Darkness fell. The night air began to cool. From amongst the razorgrain came the sound of a dozen cicadas starting up the evening chorus.

None of them moved.

“Paladin Moon,” Danse said, after a long while. “I’ve been meaning to ask for some time now, but was uncertain how to broach the subject, so I’m just going to say it. Are you and Paladin Blackburn actually married?”

Levi, who was taking a sip of the bourbon, choked, and Lane guffawed shamelessly. MacCready fell off the roof with a yelp.

“Call me Lane,” she said, wiping a tear of mirth from her eye. “And no, Levi and I were never married. That was just part of our cover and we thought it was prudent to keep it up while the Institute was breathing down our necks. Fact is, we hated each other’s guts for years. Woulda put a bullet between his eyes if I got the chance. We get on better now, but it isn’t the same without Kitt to smooth things over. Why?”


	15. XV.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> woops i finished this last week
> 
> nvm

**XV.**

Six years before Leviticus Blackburn and Lane Moon were pulled from cryofreeze, a man stood in a cemetery in a hill, facing three others, his hands bound before him. Given a couple of minutes and no eyes watching him, and he would’ve slipped the ropes around his wrists, but instead he watched at the man in the black and white check suit held out his delivery, called him _kid_ , _ha, the pissant_ , apologised – pulled a handgun from inside his shirt.

“Truth is,” Benny said. “The game was rigged from the start.”

Oh, he knew that already.

The first bullet sent him reeling backwards, tripping into the shallow grave, dizzy, confused, furious, _snarling_ – and still very much awake. It took a second round to the head to put him out properly.

He came to an indeterminate amount of time later with grit in his eyes and sand between his teeth and a mouth and throat so dry he couldn’t swallow. His head hurt, a deep ache behind his left eye. The echoes of gunshots echoed in his ears. He laid still and quiet and assessed his surroundings, noting immediately the sound of breathing somewhere off to his left.

He was not dead. He had been shot but he was not dead and he was not in a grave. He was no longer in darkness – the backs of his eyelids were red. The air around him was still, quiet but for the occasional shuffling of the man and the scrape of a dry plant against the outside wall. There was the smell of dust and wood, and, distantly, plastic and medication, but not the overpowering stink of antiseptic of a hospital or medical centre, which he had not seen the inside of since he left the Vault so many years ago.

Some small-town doctor’s office.

Not a shallow grave.

Wouldn’t’ve been the first grave he’d scratched his way outta, but it looked like this time he didn’t have to bother.

He made a waking-up sound. A sigh, a grunt, twitched and stretched, and when he heard the other man in the room hastily approach he opened his eyes to take stock of his surroundings.

“Good afternoon,” the man said, gently batting his hands away when he tried to reach for his face to wipe the grit out of his eyes. “Don’t do that. You’ve had a very serious injury. Do you understand me? Can you speak?”

“Hm,” he said.

“I’m Doc Mitchell. You’re in Goodsprings.”

Less than a mile from where he’d been shot, then. Good to know.

“Can you tell me your name?” Doc Mitchell asked. He was sitting on a chair next to the bed, tense and alert.

He sat up. Black specks appeared in the corners of his vision, and a lance of pain went through his head. He maybe cringed a little, but that would stay between himself and the good doctor.

He licked his dry, chapped lips, but his tongue was sticky with thirst. “Water?” he asked, hopefully, voice little more than the rasp of the wind over the sand.

Doc Mitchell handed him a glass.

He drank deeply, choked, coughed, felt the pain blossom behind his eyes so strongly he thought his head might explode, and then it subsided.

“Careful now,” Doc Mitchell said, taking the glass of water back off him. “Have some more in a minute. Don’t want to make yourself sick. Do you remember your name?”

He considered his options. He’d been around a while now. Some of his aliases were well known. The best known was supposed to be in a shallow grave up on the hill with two bullets in his head. Might be time to start anew with a different name, a common name, one no one would remember from the next.

“Max,” he said, after a long moment.

“Do you know what happened?” Doc Mitchell asked.

 _Yes. Fucking pissant took something that wasn’t his, tried to kill me to cover up the theft. Wouldn’t’ve been the first grave I’ve crawled outta, not the first morgue I’ve woken up in._ “No,” he said, even as he imagined an elaborate revenge that should deter future attempts on his life.

“Victor noticed something going on up in the cemetery three nights ago. He was too late to stop the shooting, but he did find the fresh grave, and when he investigated you were still alive, so he brought you back to town. To be honest, I thought you were a goner for sure and we were gonna have to take you back up and put you right back in that hole. Two bullets, straight to the noggin, and here you are, speaking to me plain as day.”

“Hm,” Max said.

Doc Mitchell leant forward. “So, I couldn’t help but notice, while I was pulling those bullets outta you – you have an awful lot of metal in your head. Never seen someone with so many implants. Never met anyone who’d want so many implants.”

Max gestured vague to his head. “Any of them broke?”

“No. They were all intact as far as I could tell, but a couple were real old and corroded. I removed them. They looked more dangerous than helpful.”

Yeah, that’d be right, with how old they were. Siekert’s first attempts, fizzled out before the first bombs ever fell, but never extracted because they tried to keep the surgeries as short as possible and there was never time for extraction.

“They were located in scar tissue?” Max asked.

“That’s right, though whether they caused the scarring—” Doc Mitchell began.

Max interrupted. “They didn’t. They were put in after. Those scars are where the cancer used to be.”

Doc Mitchell paused, considered, said: “I’d like to run a few tests.”

“All right,” Max said. “But then I want to go. I have places to be.”

“Thought you didn’t remember what happened to you?”

Max shrugged. “Don’t. Doesn’t mean I forgot my whole life, and from what you’re saying, I’m _at least_ three days behind schedule. I got places to be.”

Doc Mitchell regarded him carefully. “You are very strange. Before we proceed, I found something amongst your belongings I wanted to ask you about.” He held out a dirty box of playing cards, then opened it to pull the cards out.

They weren’t playing cards. They were the shape of playing cards, sure, but each one was printed with a single Chinese character on one side, and a drawing of a Eurasian Lynx in black ink on the other, faded, worn, some of them stained with Nuka Cola or blood.

Calling cards.

“Your name is not Max,” Doc Mitchell said, and a muscle in his jaw twitched.

“Well, it is,” Max insisted. “Most people just don’t know that, though. The tests? Like I said, places to be, people to kill.”

Maxwell Kittredge had never been able to see anything in ink blotch tests, and he wasn’t about to start today, so he made a whole bunch of bullshit up, failed a test where he had to stand in one place with his eyes closed by flailing and falling over the couch, somehow managed to score a one in INT on the Doc’s Vit-O-Matic Vigor Tester, but he’d always figured they were rigged, like those strength tests at those pre-War carnivals, and went on his way to pull Benny’s eyes out through his nostrils, major brain trauma or no major brain trauma.

He had no plans of leading New Vegas to independence, he was trying to lay low and let people forget a man called the Lynx had ever prowled the Mojave, but sometimes a guy gets caught up in things he doesn’t mean to while he goes about a routine case of revenge.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> well that was a hot mess but it was better than doing the writing i was meant to be doing, so
> 
> don't know what i'll write next but i think sci fi with like spcae and shit

**Author's Note:**

> The man is Levi.
> 
> The woman is Lane.
> 
> This story is unbeta'd and unedited. This is the draft.


End file.
